I’ve no association with Retool, but used to lead product for a popular thing that had both cloud and on-prem options.
On-prem is a real pain in terms of delivery. For a lot of customers there’s long lead times and change management processes to navigate to upgrade to a new version. There’s a wide distribution of environments and network topologies that introduce often surprising edge cases. There’s a whole lot you don’t control or don’t have visibility into. Which is almost by design and perfectly fine - it’s why the customer chose on-prem!
But… the trade off is you really want high conviction your new feature is perfect before it goes on-prem. You can just flip a feature flag to temporarily roll back some capability if you uncover an issue. It might take your customer months to negotiate with their internal stakeholders a deployment window for an upgrade.
Now obviously that’s not true of all on-prem customers. But it was true for such a large percentage of them that it was more pragmatic to accept it as the general case rather than have a higher velocity flow for the handful that would adopt new capabilities at a pace closer to Cloud customers.
Mike, Mobile Eng Lead @ Retool, here. We support on-prem if you're on a version newer than 2.100 (which has been out for a few months). If you can reach out to your AE, tommy at retool dot com, we can get you set up with mobile in no time.
This is really cool and something I've wanted at work before. I agree with @vikstrouss's comment - if you keep adding to this I think you'd have paying customers.
If on the other hand, in case you're interested in monetizing it in other ways I'd be interested in chatting with you as well.
I noticed you said you were recently laid off, if you're looking feel free to ping me, this kind of initiative is a very good sign that you're going to be just fine.
surprised not much mention of Elastic Beanstalk here - it has nearly an identical dev experience to Heroku. I moved past using it years ago but if I was looking for exactly that experience I'd probably go with it or if I was using Elixir likely I'd use fly.io because they seem to have it down pat for elixir/phoenix projects the way heroku did for ruby
Whenever I see someone say this... I wonder if your project(s) are just really different than mine, or if instead what you notice about a dev experience is just really different than what I do.
Because for me Elastic Beanstalk (plus presumably other AWS services like RDS? SQS and something else for background processes?) isn't close to the experience of Heroku of not having to think about ops at all for my whole infrastructure, including my rdbms etc.
HMBradley | All Types of Software Engineers and Product folks | REMOTE/Los Angeles | Full Time
at HMBradley we're on a mission to rebuild how consumers interact with Financial products. Our flagship product is a checking account that pays higher interest when you save more of what comes in. We launched barely 18 months ago and have acquired more than half a billion dollars in deposits (We literally grew so fast our bank account product is currently invite-only!)
But our goals are much loftier than a bank account and we're just getting started on where we go from here. We've raised over $60M to build the best loyalty program in finance. Our core advantage over every bank you've ever done business with is that we don't have a silo'd structure requiring each individual product to be profitable on its own but instead build an ecosystem around each of our customers where the rewards get better with each new product they use.
In the very first days of HMBradley I used to tell people that we were "Mailing DVDs" in reference to Netflix. Today I would say we're just starting our version of "Shipping Ladders" like Amazon Prime.
These individual endeavors are helping us create an ecosystem of best in breed financial products that revolve around the customer experience, (which is what we believe is actually broken in banking) rewarding customer's with sound financial habits incentivizing good financial behaviors we believe is a win for everyone involved.
Fundamentally we're a software company that builds financial products. I'm a fourth time founder and I'm not here to sell this company, for us this is IPO or bust, we're swinging for the fence and the next 18 months is comprised of the most aggressive roadmap I've seen in any software company, much less in financial services. If we succeed we have a chance at becoming one of the largest companies the world has ever seen.
I often tell our employees that I cannot promise success, but I can promise fireworks. After the last 18 months of fireworks I'm proud to say there will be much more where that came from. We'd love to have you join us for the ride.
If you're an entrepreneur that's had a hard time working inside of other orgs I think we might have the exact right environment to let you thrive here because that is exactly the kind of founder I've been my entire career.
This has made it incredibly hard to be an employee at other places. My mission is to make this a place where incredibly entrepreneurial people can thrive but also have the benefit of building from a solid foundation and a massive set of learnings and shared services to leverage for the future.
If this sounds interesting and you don't see a job listed on our recruiting site feel free to reach out to me directly at zach [at] hmbradley.com and I'll get you in touch with the right person. We're posting new roles every day and we're looking for several single-threaded leaders for new product initiatives that are not listed on our site today.
While this is likely true in many cases I'm in a very sensitive industry (banking) and we tend to self host things not for cost reasons but for security reasons. We spend a lot of time going through pen tests, getting SOC2 compliance, etc.
Handing off something this critical can cause an even more painful audit in many cases so just a thought to consider cost is sometimes not the only factor.
We're actually in the process of getting SOC2 and pen tests ourselves - another benefit of a hosted offering is it can (eventually) integrate into your compliance system (e.g., vanta)
A lot of our customers are in fintech (payroll, banking, etc) so we've spent a lot of effort on our security model: https://layerci.com/security
Honestly my advice would be to leave FAANG and join an early stage startup ... you're much more likely to meet a wider array of people with similar passions and interests and varied skillsets.
Even if that startup itself fails you are likely to meet people you could start another company with and if it succeeds it will be an even better place to start a company from when leaving, most exceptional founders love to support their employees leaving to start something new.
Respectfully this is awful advice, as someone who’s worked at FAANG and early stage startups. The idea that working for early stage startups will help you start your own is a myth propagated intentionally by founders/VCs to recruit SWEs with lowball offers.
FAANG is actually way better to meet cofounders. At Google you can have lunch with a talented person every day (there’s internal apps to network like this), plus countless other opportunities to network both formally and informally.
In contrast, at an early stage startup you’ll mostly work with the same people every day and your network will stagnate.
Furthermore, early stage startups tend to have a ton of work that needs to be done that they hire there engineers to do. Unless you get CTO title, you’re probably not going to get exposed much to the BD side or get investor access.
Finally, being able to work full time on your startup to get demo ready to pitch is super helpful. A nest egg from FAANG RSUs is key here, startup ISOs are probably worth nothing and will reduce your cushioning.
If you want to do a startup, go to networking events, apply to YC, etc but leaving FAANG to be an early stage employee w goal, not closer, especially if you don’t at least get CTO title.
I have to agree with ditonal. Going from a FAANG company to a startup for anything less than a CTO role is a bad idea. I know this because I did this. While it all worked out in the end (I wanted to move to Los Angeles to do heavy metal stuff with my heavy metal friends anyway) there's definitely a hard ceiling at a startup.
Stay at the cushy high paying job and network on nights and weekends. Even better, make a point to ask a person out to lunch every week at the FAANG job once the pandemic is over.
"Networking" for me has just been hanging out with my music and YouTuber buddies. Turns out if you know how to SPELL PHP or HTML you can provide HUGE value to non-technical friends. Doing something as simple as fixing a typo in some JavaScript tracking code for friend's websites makes me look like I've shown them fire for the first time. Find a hobby you like that's non-technical (for me it's learning Chinese, salsa dancing, and metal), show up, have a good time, and within a year or two you'll have a high quality network of non-technical partners.
I have to agree that this advice is awful too, unfortunately.
As an engineer for an early-stage startup you daily work and value add - shipping things and invest into deep engineering work, would not be very well aligned with networking and relationship building that would be beneficial to start on your own.
Another interesting idea to consider - as a FAANG engineer you would be able to angel invest already (or fairly soon). That would be a productive (quite expensive though) way to meet more people interested in the same things as you do.
YMMV. I've been in the same FAANG-to-early-stage position, and I found:
1. It was easy to find people interested in startups at Google, but the quality of those interactions tended to be pretty low. The vast majority of people really did not have any experience with how startups actually functioned, and most people I talked to were more taken with the prestige and fantasy of being a founder than with actually seriously thinking about running a startup. I'm sure there are great and experienced operators at Google who are very competent and pragmatic startup folks - but those were generally not the people you found at internal events geared towards "people interested in startups".
2. I learned a lot cross-functionally when I joined my current team (which was < 5 people at the time). I was talking to customers in sales and support calls, helping to think about product and market strategy, and generally helping out on a variety of interesting things. You're definitely right that I wasn't talking to investors (at least, not on a regular basis - as an early employee, sometimes investors still want to chat to learn more about how things are on the ground) nor was I spending my days prospecting and finding BD partnerships, but I did learn a surprising amount about deal dynamics, selling B2B, and thinking about markets and customers in general. That said, this may have been because of the extraordinarily open and competent sales folks I worked with.
When I look on my list of "people I would co-found with", the vast majority of those people are the incredibly intense and competent folks I met working at the (now no longer early stage) startup I moved to. In general, I think about finding a co-founder less as "cast a wide net to find your one true partner" and more as "work alongside the most aggressively competent people you can find, and hopefully some of those people will mesh with you well enough that you would consider co-founding with them" (with the corollary that, if you find yourself in a job where you feel like you're mostly coasting, this is probably not a good environment for finding co-founders (although it certainly may be a good environment for you for other reasons)).
As usual, grain of salt - I was basically a new grad when I joined Google, and I expect the experience would be very different if I had a strong, senior network there. I also come from a position of unusual privilege - my parents are both engineers and I have lots of friends in engineering and I'm good at what I do, so I am unusually risk tolerant because "running out of money" or "being unable to easily find a job" is just not a thing I worry about.
So excited to see this vision come together Eric. I honestly hope one day we're taking HMBradley public on the LTSE. I have never felt more aligned with a mission or a vision, Systematically allowing companies to take a long term view without being punished is what the market needs.
Or put another way ... Adam Smith > Milton Friedman
I cannot wait to see where this goes and the mechanics LTSE puts in place to help reward long term thinking and long term holders
The simplest answer to this is regularly tying executive compensation to short term stock performance ... it leads to more Jack Welch's and less Jeff Bezos' ... Ballmer is another prominent example, Microsoft all but died under him while his key metric was stock price, that's not a win in my book
Hey guys please don’t take this the wrong way but as a consumer when I saw the behavioral psychology headline in this post I got really excited.
Suffice it to say I was sufficiently disappointed to find out it was a prize linked savings account ... these have been run in the US for years, one of the largest in the US right now Is run by wal mart.
I LOVE nudge and I love behavioral psychology but this is not that.
Check out what we’re building at HMBradley if you want to see a real nod to creating habits.
I was hoping to see a new and interesting take here so I’m kind of curious why you settled on this angle?
We don't think anyone has done prize-linked savings the right way in the U.S. There were many search engines before Google and social networks before Facebook. We think it's mostly about execution here, and prize-linked savings is a broad term and there are lots of ways to wrap a prize-linked savings product.
Walmart has a huge distribution advantage over startups which has allowed their program to become the biggest, but there's really no front-end, mobile-first approach, and not much fun gamification to it. We also don't think the few startups that have tried something in this space have taken the right approach either by making their products overly complicated, among other things.
