SFG 32: Idit Levine on timing the market for open-source success

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In this episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, Sandhya Hegde chats with the founder and CEO of Solo.io, Idit Levine. Solo is an open-source developer platform designed to connect applications with service meshes across any software infrastructure. Their core promise to their customer is to help them migrate from 10/20 year old legacy monolithic applications to new cloud native architectures with APIs and microservices. Last valued at $1B, Solo has hundreds of enterprise customers including enterprises like T-Mobile, American Express, SAP, Sumo Logic, and more.

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Be sure to check out more Startup Field Guide Podcast episodes on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube. Hosted by Unusual Ventures General Partner Sandhya Hegde (former EVP at Amplitude), the SFG podcast uncovers how the top unicorn founders of today really found product-market fit.

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If you are interested in learning more about some of the themes and ideas in this episode, please check out the Unusual Ventures Field Guides on starting an open source company, hiring for an open source company, and building open source GTM.

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Episode transcript

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Sandhya Hegde

Welcome to the Startup Field Guide, where we learn from successful founders of unicorn startups how their companies truly found product market fit. Today we will be diving into the story of Solo. Solo is an open source developer platform designed to connect applications with service meshes across any software infrastructure.

Their core promise to their customers is to help them migrate from 10, 20 year old legacy monolithic applications to new cloud native architectures with APIs and microservices. Last valued at a billion dollars, Solo has hundreds of customers, including enterprises like T-Mobile, American Express, SAP, Sumo Logic, and more.

Welcome to the Field Guide, Idit.

It's really exciting to have you here. So going back to 2017, which is when you started Solo I believe you were at Dell EMC. Could you share with us the story of how Solo was born?

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How Idit Levine started Solo

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Idit Levine

Yeah. So honestly, this Solo story started a little bit before EMC. So most of my life I was in a startup company. That's what I like. That's what I was doing all my life. But the company that was in before EMC, I decided to leave. Everybody told me like, you should open something, you should open something. And I basically in that point understood that I'm not ready. And this is very unique because I think that definitely in Israel, and I wasn't in Israel, I was in Boston, but in Israel, a lot of people get out of the army and immediately start a company.

I felt that if I'm starting it, I really want to make sure that it will be successful. And therefore I actually felt that before I make this move and start it, I need to figure out how it is to be in a big company.

Because just, if in the future, I would want to get acquired or work with them, how would that look on the other side? And I did not have any experience before that on this. So I live in Boston. My husband is the reason we're here. My husband was back then professor at Harvard. So I knew that I cannot leave.

It was pre COVID. So working from home wasn't the thing that people were doing. And therefore I decided to look for a CTO postion. That was my dream, to become a CTO that I can learn from. So I basically Googled big companies that have CTO offices in Boston, and I found one, which was EMC. And that's why basically I went to EMC.

On the interview, I was interviewed by John Roese, who is the global CTO today of all Dell. And I basically said to him, I'm coming to you for two years to learn everything, and then I'm going to start my own company. And that's basically what I did. So I came there and honestly, I did learn a lot. A lot. And I learned mainly of how it is working on the other side. And I had no clue. I will be honest. I was very naive back then. Was very surprised. And I learned also how to pitch, how to sell my ideas, in an organization like EMC. Definitely if you're a CTO, your job is to influence, you don't have actually people reporting to you.

So you need to know how to do that. I became pretty good at this when I was there, and then Dell got acquired, like EMC acquired Dell. And I decided that it's a great time. It was just about two and a half years. And I said, this is a great time actually and I decided to start Solo. So in the beginning, in EMC itself, I was doing a lot of open source stuff, that was what I was pushing. I knew this community very well. And my job in EMC was to make noise. To position it as a leader, not to specifically sell anything, which is very different than building a startup.

So I did some open source projects that created quite a lot of noise. I was talking at almost every conference and people knew me in the ecosystem of CNCF, the Kubernetes network area.

I said, okay, I'm going to start a company. But of course, I didn't think of leaving EMC first. I have three little kids. I needed first to see how I could get paid. And I did try to pitch some of these VC. And I will be honest. First of all, we are in Boston, which is not usually a very popular place to start an infrastructure startup. And cloud native, this is not what usually you can see here.

And the second thing is that honestly, I had no clue how to do it. I will be very blunt. Like I met someone — he knew me from the previous startup that I was at. And then I said to him, okay, I want to start a company. What should I do? He said, you should prepare a pitch deck. And I said, what does that mean? It seriously was like the most clueless that you can imagine. But, when I understood that's what I need to do, I started doing it and actually got a lot of interest. The problem was that I was still at EMC.  If VC give you money, they want to see that you are committed. And if you're staying in another company, you're not committed, right? You're not showing that you're all in. That's when I made a decision with my husband that I'm actually going to leave the company. It was very risky and very small kids three of them, my husband was running for tenure in Harvard, it was a little bit crazy, honestly. And I decided to leave. 

And honestly, I came to my boss and I basically said to him, John I think it's time. And he actually was very nice. So I said, awesome. I have three months paid. And I think my husband said to me, you know what? You have six months to get money. Good luck. So six months money. I know that's what I had.I can't afford more than this. I don't have money, right? And that's what I did. And it wasn't easy. I want to be very clear. Wasn't easy at all. I thought, oh, I'm already winning now. I will be able to get money pretty easy. I already had open source experience. I created another open source to show them that I kept building, didn't really work.

And I think that actually the main pushback definitely in Boston area was where's your business person? Okay, you are the technology person, we know you'll bring technology. That's fine. Where is your business person? And I said, why would I bring a business person? That doesn't make any sense. I need to build the product first.

It doesn't make any sense. It's a waste of money. I will bring someone, but I will attract better person after I will have the market fit. So let me first build it. Get some open source excitement, then I will bring the person and I think that was honestly a big pushback, definitely in Boston.

I remember that they introduced me to some founder that potentially I could pair with, but I decided that this is not the right thing. And I decided to basically go to California where it's more likely to be accepted. 

I basically went to California. It was very disappointing. I learned a lot, but it was very disappointing. It wasn't the very easiest move. But then what happened is that, I got to the point that I'm done with my six months.

And my husband basically said to me, okay, that's your last chance. So I said, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take all the money that I have lef. I'm going to fly again to California. And you remember, not only I'm not getting money, I'm paying for all this stuff, right? And I am going to do a last pitch. And basically that's what I did. And that time, I already understood, way better how to do this. What a pitch means? What are we doing? Where are we selling? Moved a little bit the vision because I understood that's not what the VC wanted.

Also, what is the trend that VCs want? And then basically I just understood that people were looking to specifically... there was excitement about serverless. I just basically came up with a very nice speech about serverless. And basically when that I did that I knew already it went well, but also like when I came back, I said to my husband, if anybody will offers me, I really hope it will be Puneet from True.

I can't explain it that when we met, it was clear that this is meant to be, and I was right because immediately he basically offered me.. But I knew that I wanted Puneet so that wasn't an issue.I think that they asked me if I am willing to go to California and I said, I'm willing to do whatever you know? But now I think it's the right place to be here. Hiring will be simple in Boston. There's so many universitie And that's what I did. 

I had someone that today is like a partner to me to me.And it was clear that immediately he was going to join. And basically we start building the company. He was an engineer, he is our chief architect today. And so that's basically is how we started.

Sandhya Hegde

Amazing. And it sounds like that was like the inspiration for your company name as well.

Idit Levine

Yes. So at one point, I needed to find a name for the company. We had a lot of, we played with a lot of names. And every time I said, what if we would call it this? And we looked and checked. Oh, it's already taken. And then we’d say, Oh, what about this one? Check it. And then at that point I said that's a stupid idea.

What I really need to do is to basically see what's available and choose the one that I like the most. And then I looked and saw it was Solo I O. And I love O's, all my kids name is O's. And I liked the idea that if you're hiding the S, it's basically 01010. So I really liked that.

And I said, that’s what I want. And basically I said, that's the name. And I remember that the first reaction of my husband was, are you kidding me? That's the worst name ever. And I said why is that?And he said to me, everybody's telling you that you cannot go by yourself. And you're basically calling yourself Solo. Are you kidding me? And I said, exactly. That's why I'm going to do that. And basically it was actually like despite the VC who told me that I need a partner. 

Actually the IP wasn't available and what happened is that they were looking for it and looking for it and reaching out to the people that potentially had it and they weren't answering. So they were about to give me the money back and said to me, sorry. And I'm like, now I am really invested in that name. So I basically go and figure out myself, where is this person? I reached out to him and he actually sold it to me. I think for $400 or something like that. 

Sandhya Hegde

Awesome. And do you remember how many investor meetings you did to raise that first two and a half million seed round that you did in 2017?

Idit Levine

Yeah, so actually I had a bit more. So first of all, the answer is a lot. I wasn't aware of how it works, right? So it was brand new to me and I made a lot of mistakes. One of the mistake was that I thought that if everybody seezs that there is a lot of interest in my company, they actually would want to invest more.

So I actually would open the calendar and show them, here are all the VCs that I'm meeting with. But you don't want your VC to talk between themselves. No one will want to invest in you at that point. I didn't know that. So I made those mistakes. And as I said, I needed to pivot the idea in the middle. And basically, so I think that, I don't know, like I will say maybe probably 30, but the last five offers maybe 25.

The early product vision for Solo

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Sandhya Hegde

So you figured out really fast what is it that you need to do to get the seed round done, even though you hadn't really had exposure to this whole fundraising process before. I think, honestly I've been guilty of giving folks the same feedback, right? Which is, you don't want to be a solo technical founder, it's really hard. And the reality is like no matter how you approach it, building a company is so hard. And, the thing that I really take away from your story is just how relentless you are. Like, none of this was easy.And you hadn't even built a product and started working with customers yet. And you already had to overcome so many hurdles to get here. Honestly, there's no better training for the founder experience. 

And maybe pivoting a little bit to your founding insight. When we talk about product market fit at Unusual, often what we'll say is the seed is always usually a technical insight, right? Like you have some idea of a change that has happened in terms of what your end customers need or a new technology that is available to be leveraged that will have a massive impact on how software is developed if you're an infrastructure founder. 

What was that core technical insight that you started with? And if you look back today, is that still the foundation of Solo and what you're doing or has it evolved over time?

Idit Levine

So honestly, just to be fair, when I started the company, there wasn't a technical thing that I wanted to fix. I knew that I can do it better. I think that what I learned from other companies I felt that there is a lot of inefficiency.

I felt that there is a lot of people that are very good in technical. They're being slowed down, let's call it, by politics and other stuff. So if you ask me when I started the company, what I wanted to do was to take those engineers that are brilliant. And just be surrounded by them and just have a lot of fun with the technology.

That was the purpose. So when I went to pitch the first one, honestly, I had one idea. It was an open source idea that we had already done. The feedback that I got was that everybody cares about serverless. I personally did not think that you should make a company based on serverless.I felt that it's way too early. I felt that I didn't think that's going to be a market fit, but that's what people wanted to hear. So what I did is, I honestly pitched what they wanted to hear, but it was very clear to me that's not what I'm going to build.

So I got the money as a serverless company.And when I got the money, I sat and said, okay. Now, let's look at the market. What is really missing here? And that's really what I did. So the question is, what was missing there? And it was pretty clear that in 2017 that it was the big things of moving from monolithic to microservice. That's what everybody was doing. It was like very exciting to everybody to do this. It was clear to me that by doing this, we're solving already a lot of problems. If you look at all the tooling that was around the place, there's Kubernetes, there is container and a lot of other stuff, that was already different. It was clear to me that because it's a new stack, it will give us an opportunity to basically to reinvent the networking stack and perfect fit to what we are building right now, which is more container, way more scalability and that we needed to do before.

So I knew that this is something that would be a good way to refresh the market that I can go and basically build. And honestly, to be fair, it's not that different than today. I can explain why we were doing it in a fantastic way to like reinvent the container computing ecosystem and so on. We are still using very old API gateways with active Cassandra clusters. So we basically are running microservices, but we're managing with these like monster monoliths that are being extended and the communication between these, there's a lot of inefficiency of how we're doing this in today in organizations. So that was what I tried to fix. And, when you're doing this, there is the early adopter. There was a market and it was immediate and a lot of people consumed the open source project. And I can say that we're that right now is just the time it came to actually the enterprise.Not right now, they're the adopter. They're the customer. Yeah.

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API Gateway as a stepping stone towards service mesh

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Sandhya Hegde

And who would you say were kind of your design partners, like your very early adopters who helped you frame the product strategy, figure out what it is that especially given what you're doing, there's so much surface area to cover, right? What were the early kind of big prioritization decisions you made on what's the minimum viable product Solo needs to build?

And who are the people who are the early customers who helped you like, make those decisions,?

Idit Levine

So I'm a big believer in you need to show. So I'm actually not a big fan of going to a customer and talking to them. I'm a big believer in even today, honestly, if you ask a customer, if Ford back then asked customers, what do you think we should build? They would have told him a faster horse. They were not going to tell him to build a car. 

So I do believe that actually, what I wanted to hear is the problem. But I wanted to come up with a solution. I don't want them to tell me what to build. So back then it was a little bit different. I understood what’s going to be a big problem and I decided to go and build the solution.

I understood that here is like this proxy that is very interesting. I saw that service mesh was released by Google and IBM. that's very interesting. But, a service mesh is going to take years until people will adopt it. And what we put in the open source wasn't even close to ready. It was very, early. And what I also understood is this thing is going to be big. 

It is called service mesh whose responsibility to basically connect in the best way I can describe all those microservices, either communication between them or communication that comes to them, to the cluster. And so I basically said to myself, okay, let's assume that this thing is I really believe that this thing will be everywhere. 

So I had that 3 million, right? Not a lot of engineering. I need to basically just figure out what am I doing? And what was clear to me was that ... service mesh will be this thing that everybody will run. It will take years until people will run it. So the question is what am I doing?

I have 3 million right now. And I can't really come to my investor and tell them, don't worry. Five years, stop. And you will have the first customer. I just cannot do that. So I said to myself, so how am I fixing that problem? And I said, I looked at the service mesh and I understood that in that service mesh, there was one piece that was A, very mature and B, the hardest one to operate. And that was the proxy. And it's called Android Proxy. It was actually running already in Lyft. So Lyft running it already in production. And they open sourced it. And I felt that this is, the way this proxy works is, it was suitable to this micro services environment. Because it's API driven.

There was a lot of methodologic that make more sense versus what was popular back then with HAProxy or Nginx. So I saidthat's actually really interesting. That's what I should work on this. So here's what I'm going to do. While they're going to work on building the mesh, it will take them year. I'm going to take that piece, and I'm going A, figure out how I'm building on top of it, or basically customize that, because there was the ability to customize those endpoints. And second of all, is there already a market that I can sell today? And when I looked at the market, it was clear to me that API gateway will be a good one to attack.

And the reason is because it was a very mature market. But as I said, while we were changing the world, right with all this like cool container and stuff, there's nothing interesting happening in that market. They were still running these monolithic applications with an active customer cluster that you need to manage.

Very robust and hard to operate. So I said to myself, oka,. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take that endpoint and I'm going to basically build on it an API gateway and control plan and we'll go off to that market. And I think that was probably one of the smartest things that I did, because what I understood back then is that this API gateway will be this stepping stone for service mesh.

So if I'm already in that account and the people are happy, I will be able to very easily extend it when it will be relevant. And that's what I did. I open sourced a project called Gloo. And Gloo because it's GLOO but the idea is it's glueing all those environments together and microservices and monolithic and so on. And we started it. It's become very popular because it was really well built and already with some hint of customization of how it's going to work with Lambda. It was a very nice package delivery. And again, we just worked on community. That's all I wanted in that point.

Just get the feedback from the user that will try to use that as a simple ingress and not give me a dime. So that was the first start that we got, so some feedback from the community, but honestly, as I said, we actually did very well. And then what's happening is that it was clear that we needed to basically start looking for customers. I remember the first one and I can tell you that the first one that we got was interesting enough. I remember I came to Yuval who is my chief architect and I said to him, okay, I got us a POC and he said what are you talking about? I would never pass this. We don't even have a product. Yeah, but we will learn from it a lot. So let's do it. And we got it. We actually Apache which was from Google, right? We killed this, we were doing so well. So that was the first customer, Vonage, now Ericsson. They helped us a lot to build it. They were pretty happy, but they gave us a little bit of feedback. But I think what then happened really quickly is that we did all of this with Slack. We had open source Slack and we basically worked very closely with the customer. And every time that there was someone else that was interested, we'd open a Slack for them, and that's how we got the data.

And then we started having way more. So American Express and ADP and Carfax and T Mobile, like suddenly more and more people start coming and they are the ones that at that point helped us tune the product. And I think that was very helpful. So basically, at that point, they help us to make the product that it was.  And then, once we are getting a lot of success and working very closely with companies and scaling. Right now, probably people don't know, but you're probably using Gloo by itself, you just don't know that because it's everywhere. And, it's in very high scale running. So again, that was basically how our customers helped, but honestly it happened after, and it was more tweaking versus real change.

Sandhya Hegde

Absolutely. I think, especially with enterprise software, you definitely don't want to ask customers, hey, what should we build, right? They will give you feature requests forever, but they will never tell you what's the right product to build. But they're experts in their problem and you want to focus on making sure you understand their problem and only get feedback on the product vision you have.

That makes sense, though. I think a few follow up questions for you. One, like the, your conviction around focusing on the API gateway what were you looking at? Was that kind of what you had already seen at EMC? What were your data points when you were looking around to say, okay, it's the API gateway?

Idit Levine

A a lot of the people told me we should go talk to customer and prospects. Even today,I have product management today and they're always telling me, let's go talk to customer. And I said, guys, here's the thing. We can't right now go to three customers and get feedback for them. But a lot of the time what we're trying to do, API gateway was already there. There was alreadyApache. There was already Kong. There was other customers that already were using more the legacy API gateway, and I felt that learning from them, first of all, it's a lot, because they talk to hundreds of customers.

So I can see a little bit. And also, honestly, the internet is full of stories, right? This is the beauty of it. I went to see what Netflix did and I went to see what other people did. And I got enough data to understand what people are looking for. And I think that honestly, so I basically got that data by myself.

I didn't go to, as I said, when I went to the customers was after the fact, right? 

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. And walk us through the timeline for this. Summer 2017, you start the company. When was it that, you had Vonage, Amex, like, when did you start actually getting your live product, how long did it take for you to build up to your first customer, your first paid customer, perhaps?

Idit Levine

So I will be honest. When we started in the beginning, it was, as you say, end of, honestly, I will say December, it's when we were like, I got the money, I think it's September, October, and really started the company in December. It actually was really in the end of 2017. I think that six months later, we basically open sourced Gloo. I was trying to look noise and get market share in the community way more than looking for customers. So we open after two, six months, after eight months, a lot of this bet that I made, sometimes you're making bet and it's funny, all of them came true.

So I'm like, whoa. So what happened is that we partner with HashiCorp. And they wanted to build their own service mesh, but they needed help with the endpoints.. So we build the endpoint part for them, and we partnered there, and they told it on their keynote. And then I partnered with Google, with Docker, and they basically put me on, back then, they were the biggest conference and the most interesting conference in the company. And they basically put me on the keynotes to talk to I think it was like 8K people. So it was really good experience and so on. And the product went well and we got a lot of respect, even from the SEO guys from Google.

And it was clear that we knew what we're doing. So we got a lot of people looking at at us and saying those guys know what they're doing. And I think it's really quickly with the point that also VC understood that we know what we're doing. We weren't looking, I will be honest, like back then we were, as I said, I took 3 million. I think maybe we were six people, right? I was even sitting in, actually CRV, basically I knew someone there. The company was actually sitting in the CRV office in Boston, even though we were not invested by them and they just gave us a room, two rooms and we basically were sitting there so I didn't need to pay for that even. So honestly I had most of the money still in the bank. I didn't spend a lot of those and and then I got like offers that was very hard to actually say no to and I said why not? So I basically took I think it was like what, 12 million or something like that. And again, I'm talking to you. We had just an open source project. We were six people that was the company. And then when we said, I said, okay, then and then we just started a board. We didn't have any board before that.

So they basically asked me, okay, how much money are you going to make? And I said, huh, you want me to make money? I don't know how much you want. And they said, I don't know, two and a half million. I said, okay, then. And that's basically how we started. So then I said, okay, maybe I'd rather get a customer.

So it was really when I understood that's when I, I needed to do it was very quickly. And this year we did way more than number that we should have do.

And the quarter the year later, we basically did multiply by almost seven, that number. 

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Idit Levine's approach to founder selling

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Sandhya Hegde

And you obviously had gotten this feedback only like a year ago that, oh, you need a business partner, don't have sales experience, you're going to be like, selling software to some of the biggest, slowest moving companies in the world. What was your experience kind of being, in those meetings and what was your approach?

Obviously you already knew how these companies work. You have spent time at a big one like EMC. Did you like go do okay, founder selling, find a mentor or what was your process of learning how to navigate that part of the process?

Idit Levine

So honestly, even to the day I can say that I don't have a coach and I didn't have a mentor, which is pretty crazy. I know that a lot of founders use it and maybe I should, but I just didn't ever. I would say that so in our market, definitely, which is a market that open source and there's a lot of excitement, a lot of the sellers anyway, down up, they bringing us. So that's what we did. And engineering. I don't have to talk to engineering. Actually, it was very good. We started with engineers. So we started with the director level, right?

But we didn't go all the way to the CIO and then what happened? They just brought us like, we want POCs that we did on Slack and then they went and got us the package and then, we just needed to go. So it was very easy. And then, maybe I will need to talk to the executive.

But again, even that usually they have some hint of, they know what the problem or the technical . Just was like very easy in those terms. So I felt that wasn't like, that wasn't a big problem to sell. Honestly I have to say it was very easy.

But even today I know how to sell. I don't know. It's I always knew, I was born like this. I don't think that it's something that I needed to learn. But you are learning a lot of stuff. There's no question about it, right? If I'm looking at right now today, even simple stuff, like I didn't think how salespeople think.

So hiring. A lot of that go to market side and stuff that I needed to learn, but doing the first sales. Honestly, usually it's done by the founder anyway. We know the space very well. We usually people, very technical. So it wasn't an issue at all.

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Idit Levine's evolution as a CEO

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Sandhya Hegde

How do you think about what were the hardest parts of your early founder CEO journey for you? What were the parts that didn't come naturally? You had to figure out how to do something differently from your intuition. Was there anything like that?

Idit Levine

I learned a lot of stuff that were very important during the processes. I'm trying to figure out hard stuff, like for instance one thing that was very helpful for me is to let go the first person that didn't work. It was specifically one of my best friends, which was even harder.

But I had to do it. It was clear that he would be miserable and I would be miserable. So I think that's one thing that was very tough. So I remember that because I was like, relatively in the beginning, it was very painful. And by the way, before I let him go,I talk to my friends to make sure that he will take him back. So I took care of him. But it was tough. What I mean, I will be honest with you. Usually all the stuff was relatively native. I think that one of the things that was hard, as I said, is to understand how salespeople think.

Definitely a good one. They really think about their salary in a different way than mid engineer or, so I think that was one thing, and in general what I learned is how to motivate people. And in the beginning of this process, I remember myself saying, okay, that's very easy. I'm going to look at you and say, and I know that you probably want what I want.

I said, oh, probably what will motivate you is to win. But what I discovered is not everybody is being motivated in the same way. So it took me a lot of time, but I think I've become very good with this to understand that people are different and you need to try to motivate them.

So I had two people, right? I'm a person that just want to win. That's what I want in my life. I don't care about anything else, not about money or any other titles and stuff. I just want to win. I want to be the best. That's what I want to do. And that's how I tried to push it. And one of those people, it was a person that was bullied when he was young. So he was always like, I want to win. He want to win in a different way. He want wanted to win, right?. And and I remember just to motivate him was more like, we're going to crush Google or something like that. And it's  Oh God, then they didn't think that I'm good. That was motivating him and then there was the other one who basically, honestly, I said to him, we're going to show them and I said to him, what is interesting to you? And he said, money. And I said to him, they're taking your money. You need it. Google is taking your money. And basically, motivated him differently and you learn how to do this. And honestly then you're creating this thing that you're all going to the one direction. And you're very united and very aligned. And you're just doing the best you can to win. And I think that's something that I learned a lot. And again, it took me time to understand. I made a lot of mistakes.

Sandhya Hegde

No, that's very well said. I think, what I have often seen is that when you, especially when you start and you have product market fit and then you start hiring, right? You assume that like everyone you hire is going to just grow the culture you already have. And it's a very clear culture to you as a founder because you've hired all the people that you understand really well and work like you.

They are very self motivated. They all want the same thing. But then, you when you have PMF, it's actually a huge advantage to be able to hire talented people who have very different motivations. You can scale your company faster if you're able to hire very different types of people and figure out how to motivate them, how to make them a part of a more diverse, vibrant culture, right?

But it's a hard thing for founders to do. To be able to make that sudden change of, okay, I'm going to go from being, just a founder to learning how to like, be like, more of an executive and, motivate very different types of people. It's a very hard shift to do because you're almost trying to behave like a different person than who you were six months ago.

Idit Levine

Yeah, Yeah, and I will say that if I'm looking at the company for the first, I think, what, two, three years before we got the billion dollar valuation. Honestly, that wasn't hard. I will be honest. First of all, I was hiring all the people. I worked hard, but we had a blast. There weren't a lot of challenges.

I didn't feel that Oh, my God, I'm over my head. I knew what I was doing. Everything was good. I thought about the coming challenges and it's maybe not relevant to this, but I think it's where we needed to scale. Yeah. And suddenly it's not like I hired those people, suddenly someone else hiring those people and suddenly I don't even know all those people in the company.

And the other thing is that it's also and you, if before that, a lot of the data that came to me was coming from, I'm talking to everybody. Suddenly I cannot talk to everybody.

So suddenly I got to the point that, for instance, it was hard to sell. And I'm asking why it's hard to sell. I know I can sell it. So why are they having a hard time? And they don't know because I don't have visibility into this. So again, I think that’s where it will become harder.

But also, then you learn, you're adjusting, you're learning, you understand how to do this. So it's always learning and always change and your role always changes. It's always a new challenge. So I guess it's interesting.

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Solo’s approach to open source community-building

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Sandhya Hegde

And maybe a question more about this more at scale part of the Solo journey that you are at today. How do you balance open source community building, traditional marketing? Like, how would you describe your strategy for kind of developer marketing right now, which, includes the open source community?

Idit Levine

Yeah. So honestly, even here, I would say that it was interesting. When I started, I really generally believed that I'm going to go, I'm going to open a damn good project. I know we are very solid in writing code. It would be very good in terms of market fit and very easy to use. And people just will use it and everybody will adopt it.

And it will be fantastic. And Oh boy, I discovered so much stuff. I discovered stuff like for instance, when I was in EMC, everybody wanted to interview me, but when I went to a small startup, the same people that were so nice to you totally ignoring you right now, or actually you will discover that actually the big company sometimes just going to steal your code and put it in their stuff to write it better because they have a brand name that is better.

We discover so much stuff, like honestly, I feel that after three years. I was like, again, I don't want to make anybody demotivated, but I was like, in shock. I thought that I went to EMC and learned, how to be careful, but I'm not a politician.

Oh boy, I was wrong. I came to the open source community and it's honestly, behind the scenes, it's nothing like you think. And I think it was a big shock to me, like very big shock to me. And I think it's got to the point I was very successful, like the company was doing a lot of good stuff, but I was so sad,. Whoa, it's not what I was thinking. So I think that was a a tough spot. I felt that I would become the opposite, which is like I need to protect myself but I think that during those years, I learned that, I understand right now and I think the balance is relatively simple.

I think that you are building a very good open source project that is usually covering a lot of the stuff that people want. But not the enterprise product. We are not looking to make money from people running a 10 people team. This is not what we're looking for.

We want them to be part of the community. Give us feedback and contrbue, but we don't want them to pay us. When you want to make the money is more on the big enterprise customer. And if that's what you want, build the feature that's very relevant to them as an open core. So basically coming on top of it.

So that's basically what we did. And, since then, of course, just FYI, we started with the gateway, but it was clear that's not where we were headed and we moved to the service mesh. So we have two markets that we are attacking and both of them extremely big and, so you learn a lot.

It was a lot like, honestly, it's a lot of fun, lots of challenges and a lot of fun.

Sandhya Hegde

You did an exceptional job in like really understanding the market timing and making sure that were focusing on the right thing, that there was a ready market for at the right time. And there are so many good ideas that die because the timing is not right. So an amazing judgment there.

Idit Levine

When we started in the gateway, immediately, we said, okay, we're not going to work on service mesh, but we're at least going to associate ourselves with service mesh, so we open sourced projects that also were very successful.

So it was, we always knew that we would go to that direction, we just did it right by bringing the revenue, and then when the revenue was relevant there, now we could expose it 

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Advice for founders building open source projects

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Sandhya Hegde

Maybe to wrap this up, I'm curious what would be your advice to founders starting out today in open source infrastructure, given everything, today, compared to, say, five or six years ago, what would be your advice to founders in open source infra?

We are working with, several for example open source infra founders working on new AI tooling, that's the big new markets category opening up. What would be your advice for folks like that?

Idit Levine

So I can say what everybody's saying when you ask them, it's just don't. If you ask me after the first two years, the first three years of Solo was so smooth, like it was easy and fun and exciting. I will tell you like, yeah, sure, start it, it will be a lot of fun and very rewarding.

Even if you will fail, you at least will gain enough stuff that you will be able to find a better job. I will say right now that honestly, if you're looking at the world, like I'm trying to figure out as a startup, what I need to overcome, right? And what we need to overcome is COVID.

After COVID, all the engineering decided to leave because, people needed to change something because they couldn't change anything else because of COVID. And then the price , in order to hire an engineer, you needed to pay them like 200K. And then the VC market went crazy and basically it started to gain like crazy amount of people.

So if I got valuation by giving it,100k, suddenly just like my competitor getting it at 500k, right? And have more money to spend. And then after, it was the SVB problem that we had, and I remember one day, like suddenly 130 million gone from my bank. 

And then, there was a recession and now is a war. It's like always something. I remember asking one of my VCd, Satish from Red Point, who is amazing and was a founder before, a successful founder. And I remember asking him and I said to him. Did you also need it to do all of this stuff? And honestly, no, like the world wasn't that crazy back then. So I will say that it's tough, it's hard, it's harder than it looks. You even will ask yourself if this is something that you even need to do.

Sandhya Hegde

Yeah, you want to do it despite that, not believe that it will be easy. You want to be a founder despite all of the challenges that come and enjoy. 

Idit Levine

So I can tell you, it's like people like, a woman getting pregnant and then they deliver. It's like the worst thing ever, but then they still doing it again, right? And you ask yourself, wait, did you forget all about it? I think startup is not that different from this.

It's it's nuts to open a company.it's draining. You're losing your family. It's very hard. And I'm not even talking about the fact that I was lucky to succeed, but there was a lot of people that started with me and miserably fail, but made the same effort.

I'm very happy I'm doing it. Don't get me wrong. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I'm learning. I'm developing, this is who I am. I don't think I could have done something else. But it's definitely not for everybody. And it's definitely not as easy as it looks. That's all I wanted to say. It's a lot of people problems, way more than technology problems.

Sandhya Hegde

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today, Idit. I absolutely loved this conversation and learned so much from it. I think my big takeaway is, sometimes you break all the rules like that. As a founder, you cannot really follow rules. You have to go where your conviction leads you. And, be enough of a student of the market to have great judgment, but then lead with your conviction.

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