Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have MatthewGregory, CEO of Ockam. Ockam empowers developers to build applications that cantrust data in motion across complex, variable and hostile networks. Matthew,I'm so excited to chat with you and, and not only learn about your background,your experience, which.

I know you've been through a, a fewdifferent bouts and, and your experience is, is extremely wealthy in terms ofthe knowledge you've gained. And overall I'm excited about Ockam and, and whatyou're working on because it's this interesting cross between technology andcommunity that I think is so fascinating, especially in the world of startupsnow and today.

But off the wall question here, I heard somethingabout you started your, your career in Perfectional sports. So tell me a littlebit about what you learned from that experience and, and how it led into acareer in.  

Matthew: Well, it started off,as coming out of engineering school and I was really into sailing at the time.

I sailed in college and I was fortunateenough to kind of jump into sailing at the highest level. And I right aftergraduation, I went down to New Zealand to be part of an America's Cup to Cupteam, and I ended up doing couple America's cups sail. Most of the way aroundthe world in the Volvo Ocean Race until our, our boat nearly sunk in the IndianOcean.

So, but that entire time it was, I've, Ihad a very technical role on the team. was doing weather analysis, data analysis,building basically where iot data logging systems prior to people talking aboutiot. You can kind of think of it a little bit similar to what you would see, ifyou watch.

Formula One that Netflix showed thatwhere they're looking at real-time data coming off the cars. So I had a verytechnical role on the team. But, it was in the context of professionalsports.  

Julian: That's, that'sincredible. And I didn't realize how involved sailing was in that degree.

How, how, first of all, how did you almostdrown in, in or with a shipwreck? What, what happened in the Indian.  

Matthew: Uh, I was doing a raceat the time, it was called the Volvo Ocean Race, and actually the latestedition of it is happening right now. The boats just arrived in Cape Town andthey're headed down to the Southern Ocean in about a week to finish their laparound the planet.

But we had a structural failure. Withour keel system and it was basically the end of our race. We did not sink, butit was a harrowing couple hours while we were attempting not to sink andeventually made it to Singapore, but that was the, the end of our adventurearound the world.  

Julian: What, what ended up,so you, you're, you're selling across the world.

You're, you're in competition. And what,what was the inspiration or the catalyst to go into technology? Was it, was ita complete career switch? Was it a segue into the industry and what, or did younever leave technology? W what was that? Experience I can transitioning fromsports to, to to tech.

Matthew: It was, I guess, kindof looking back, it was a natural progression. It was probably there was alittle bit of, I was pushed out of sailing and into tech with the downturn.2008, nine the sport. Really? Yeah. Started shrinking at that point. So, aneffort to maintain gainful employment, I ended up Joining the team at WeatherUnderground, I knew I, again, weather background and I ended up building whileI was there, a developer tool for and it was a weather api.

So this is early days of p i businesseslike Twilio and Striper going at the same time. I guess you could sayunfortunately I picked weather instead of payments or telecommunications.Probably smaller, less interesting market from a personal finance point ofview, but, It was you, you almost ubiquitously used a p i, if you've seenweather on your phone, on Yahoo, Facebook, and Eventbrite.

Yeah, that was where people got weatherfrom for, almost half a decade.  

Julian: Yeah. And what wasthe, you, you're going through that experience, I noticed you worked at acouple large companies and then you jumped to Star Ockam. And what wasessentially the catalyst or, or the inspiration to start a company like Ockamand, and work with developers to build more and more tools?

Was there something that you thatinspired you at, at, say Microsoft? I know you had a stint there in, inSalesforce as well, or, or was it completely an offshoot project?  

Matthew: It was, It was a longtime in the making, but it then, it kind of happened really fast when it did. Ialways wanted to start a company concerned to be very entrepreneurial.

Even I would, I could make the argumentthat what I did and sailing was entrepreneurial. What I did at WeatherUnderground was entrepreneurial, but, and even what I did when I was atMicrosoft was pretty entrepreneurial, but it was kinda like in a. As opposed toYeah. The waiting people normally think about as starting a, filing thepaperwork to create a C corp in Delaware.

Yeah. So it was always on my radar,something that I wanted to do, I guess you could say, like, to complete myjourney, my career. Yeah. , but then there was the, well, what are you, whatare you gonna do? And I always knew I wanted to do something that was deeptech, something that I would describe as actually technical, not just somethingthat's using technology.

So, it was a matter of kind of figuringout what that was going to be. And I to, in kind of, I guess through a littlebit of luck and being, living in San Francisco. I was able to experience thisevolution in tech technology that was happening kind of from the beginning ofcloud up through my time in Microsoft.

And there was just kind of thisprogression of technology that needed to exist to empower developers to keepbuilding distributed applications. And I decided that that was the, the placefor me. And that was how Ockam was was born..

Julian: Yeah. What was thatexperience? Just like this, working with developers is not a typical kind of,B2B or even b2c, really.

And because I feel like your customersare so involved in the product e even more so than, than a lot of othercustomers, especially within the technical component. How, what, what's theexperience and, and I guess what do you enjoy and what maybe is what, what's achallenge of working with developers as well?

Matthew: Yeah. I think ofmyself as. Person that likes tools even mm-hmm. , working tools bike tools. Soas a builder of things, I have like empathy for people that build stuff.Because I also build things both, on, in, in digital world and also in aphysical world. So, yeah, I'm kind of drawn to tools I guess you could even sayis in my family, my great-grandfather moved to the.

To Detroit where I'm originally fromback in the early industrial age to and use a tool in dye maker. So I guess youcould say in some weird way, it's come full circle. But I think I just have a apassion for empowering people to build things. So I really like the developertool space because of.

Julian: Yeah. And describethe, the building process overall and, and where, where Ockam comes in and, andwhy it's so necessary, especially nowadays with, I, I, I feel like time andtime again, I'm hearing. And just for, for, for insight, I, I run a company thathelps developers get opportunities in, at, at, at companies in the us.

These developers in South America, and alot of them are working on opensource projects and contributing and working onthese tools. And I know how imperative it is for them to work well and beefficient and effective. But I know it's, it's not as, as perfect as, as theywould, would hope for, and it continues to improve.

What was the process before Ockam and,and why is Ockam so necessary to building. .

Matthew: Yeah. It, it's, it's aprogression in just what's happening in cloud computing. Like if you kind oftake a futurist view of the world, you can imagine machines everywhere talkingto each other, think how people are thinking about ai.

Like you just have these distributedapplications. They're all talking to each other and kind of insert your, maybewhat anyone that's listening to this has kind of thought of the world will looklike in 20, 30 years. , it's really difficult just to jump all the way tothere. And there are all these little pieces that need to exist.

There needs to be the, like even if youjust kind of even go back to the beginning of the internet, just look at theprogression. Like you have to lay the fiber, you have to build the datacenters, you have to have the, storage network and compute to run theprocesses. You need to be able to move the data.

You need to have security. So the, thisis like, it can just only move so fast. And if you look at that arc of how datais moving around between DIS in distributed systems or cloud on-prem IOTvehicles, you just kind of think mobile. Yeah. There's a piece that I saw thatwas missing and decided to go build a company to go fill in that gap.

Julian: Yeah. And what was thegap that you saw?

Matthew: it, and I'll put thisin the context of this arc of the story and, and kind of the view I had of theworld at, at the beginning of Ockam. So we already talked about how I startedoff kind of getting into this developer tool space through the API built toWeather underground. I then land a Heroku, which is like an amazing experienceto be part of what was going on the earliest parts of cloud.

It was you. Around all these amazing,very forward-thinking people that had a very developer tool ex great experienceview of how things should work. And at that time if you kind of go back to likethose early days of Heroku, the concept of cloud was, mm-hmm. Well, you don'tneed any of the machines anymore.

There's an abstraction on top. You canbuild your application and then just magically ship it off to the cloud and.You're, you have deployed your application into the world, everyone can startusing it. But what's even better is there's this slider bar because you don'thave to worry about racking servers anymore.

And cloud is gigantic. Your app can justscale and scale and scale and scale. And so if you look at all theseapplications that were built in Ruby and like in early cloud , was kind of the,the progression. Well, as it turns out, when you build something to scale ofAirbnb or Twitter or any of these applications that were being built at thetime mm-hmm.

you end up with scaling problems.Basically. Just the classic problems that people have had with in computerscience. Yeah. Since forever. So. Okay, everyone comes up with this new idea.Okay. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have microservices. We're gonnatake our big monolithic application.

We're gonna shrink it down into a bunchof little pieces, and then we're gonna allocate machines to those littlepieces, and we will scale each one of those little things up and down,depending on what we need. Well, that turns into a thing that needs a developertool. So, so we have the cloud and the developer tools to get stuff online likeHeroku.

We then have the things to enablemicroservices like Docker. Well, now we need to orchestrate all these machines.So enter the world of Mesos and Kubernetes. Now, at the time I was working withthese technologies in Microsoft. and we launched Azure Container Service. And Ihad this really unique view into this world from Microsoft's perspectivebecause of all the legacy applications that Microsoft was running and also in.

In data centers, we saw this distributedmassive compute problem where people were run, wanting to run some workloadslocally, wanting to run some things in Azure. They might be buying something,some databases of service that's running over an aws. So as soon as you takeall these microservices and you're not controlling them in.

A little bubble that is protected whereyou can run the machines and scale auto, auto scale them as necessary, andthey're distributed all over the place. Well, now you have this trust problemand that was the, this kind of, if you take this arc of where we're going and havingthis interoperability between.

all machines everywhere, doing anythingbetween everyone. Well, how are you going to move all of this data around,between all of these apps? Like, it's even more complicated cuz these appsbecome ephemeral very quickly where they get spun up and down. So how are you,how are we gonna solve this problem? And that's the problem we want out to gosolve at Ockam.

And as, as I said, it was, it was a, itwas a big problem to go solve as deeply technical. It's taken us several yearsand, many millions of dollars and some the smartest people on the planet to gosolve it, but we've solved the problem.  

Julian: Yeah. Describe the,the whole, the, the concept of trust and the importance of, having trustbuilding these tools for, for developers to use enough so for the ability forthe business to  

Matthew: Yeah. I think of trustas this. There's a couple mental models I'll, I'll run you through. First iswe're talking about trust between applications. A lot of people have heard oflike the level one through seven in, in like the internet stack and the, thelower ones, we'll call those like the lowest level.

Those are the networking layer. Andnetworks aren't secure by themselves, so we need some security. So you got asecurity layer on top of. . And then you have the application layer, like dataand application layer on top of that, if you kind of squint a little bit onthat model. Right. Trust, when we're talking about trust, we're talking aboutapplication layer trust as opposed, which is, I think distinctly different thansecurity.

And then the, the kinda the key insighthere is to pull on another model to discuss. What we're trying to have isinteroperability, and if you think, why is it so difficult for things to, inremote places, to interoperate with each other? Well, they need to trust eachother. They need to trust the data that is moving into the, into theapplication where some if then statement is going to run and then do some thingin that remote location you have to trust that the data you're getting is.

Trustworthy. Mm-hmm. . And a little bitof the insight here is, well, how do you create this trust and that is anidentity problem. So, in the early days of Ockam, we, talked a lot about how wewere this identity solution. And one of the key insights there is that all ofthe identities in our, in our protocols are generated.

In the machine and in the software wherethat where that data is running. So if some application gets spun up on somemachine, our protocol runs and creates an identifier cryptographic key that isprivately held in that device and or application, it's only known to thatapplication. And that once you have that primitive, you can start thinking ofthese other abstractions.

Setting up secure channels between theand doing handshake key exchanges between these applications and so on and soforth. End, end encrypting the data. We work with Okta and oa. Standards to beable to pull things like auth authorization rules. Yeah. Into our protocol. Soyou start being able to talk about these higher order trust things once yousolve the first problem, which is who am I talking to as another application?

Like, are you who I think you are? Yeah.And, and that was kind of the thing that unlocked. basically the entire stockfor us.  

Julian: Yeah. If you, thinkingabout other companies that kind of rely on, on trust or, or rely on, on thisrelationship with their customer, what are some, what are some things that.

you've done well, or, or that you'velearned from, and also that you've learned from, excuse me, that he has helpedyou build trust and build community because it's challenging and, and it'salso, it's not a consistency issue, but it's also communication. It's, it'shaving value and high value information and, and educational component.

What are some ways that, didn't work outfor you, but what are some ways that worked out for you in terms of, buildingthat trust and building that community and, and to get to where you are?  

Matthew: Oh, you're talkingabout the people. So this is thanks for bringing this up because I think it's,as a, a technologist and engineer, it's, it's easy to get into talking aboutthe tech and how things work.

But yeah, the, you're kind of hitting onthe reason why probably the biggest reason of the many reasons why I wanted tostart Ockam is I want to go to work and work with the smartest people in theworld every day from diverse backgrounds. And to me that is the most, that'sthe like kind of joy I get out of getting up out of bed and going to work.

And so, yeah, if you think about thisjust feedback loop of we're building this team so that we can build tools toenable people so that they can participate in our community, so we can learnfrom them. And maybe so that some of them end up joining the team. It just, weare just creating this kind of virtuous cycle of Yeah.

People helping people build, learn.It's, it's very much kind of like Yeah. To kinda insert another framework here.It's very much like coming at this from like a growth mindset point of view.Yeah. And thinking about how how kind like together and as a system we're goingto like create these.

These new worlds for ourselves. .  

Julian: Yeah. And what are someof the, the maybe locations or areas that you start to build this trust? Areyou communicating with, this community, whether it's over discord or, ordifferent channels on your website? What are some, like, if a founder came toyou today say, I, I wanna start a community, I need to start building arelationship with my customers.

Where do I start? And, and my customersare developers in particular because I think there's, they're, they're not hardto reach, but there's a specific area where, where they communicated and startto commune and, and start sharing ideas. Where do I go to, to start doing thatas a, as a founder?  

Matthew: Yeah. We haven't, it'sfunny you mentioned that. We have a whole blog on our philosophy for building,communicate communities in the open source space. On our blog and maybe we canadd that to the show notes so people can go Yeah. And check that out later. Andjust, I think it's not necessarily the only way to do things is just happens tobe the way we've done things and it's happened to work out.

Yeah. I, I mean, being available isprobably the first thing. And being responsive. So having a place for people togo. We have been using GitHub discussions for most of our mm-hmm. , communitybuilding. Obviously. The open source ecosystem has tools and channels forengaging with people. And actually next week we are launching our Discord c.

We have been doing everything throughGitHub discussions, which is fantastic. But we've realized the person to personand kind of some of the notifications and tools of Discord we've kind of hit ascale where it's probably a better ecosystem, better tool Yeah. For ourcommunity now that we're at the stage that we're at.

So, you can find us on Discord,these.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And tellus a little bit about the traction, how many how how many developers are, areworking and building with you and, and what not only is excited about thetraction from the, the past few years, but also within this year. What, what'skind of the target for you and exciting milestones that you're looking to reachthis year?

Matthew: Yeah, it's . This isone of the paradox of I guess being in the open source ecosystem, a lot ofpeople do things with your tools and it's, it's, it's difficult to track. Yeah.So, we know who people do the kind of like low calorie thing and like star orrepo which, is, makes.

That's a touchpoint which allows us toreach out or talk to people. Yeah, people will contribute to our open sourcecode. We've had over 200 people contribute to Ockam. Uh, you know, we, we kinddo our part by putting out a bunch of easy to digest first issues. We'rebuilding our code and rust.

So, it's, it's an area where people arelearning the language and we kind of feel like that's something, as goodcommunity stewards to. Like be thoughtful about issues that we put out sopeople that are learning rust can gain some experience and talk to us and dosome problem solving with what they're trying to figure out.

So we're helping them learn this newlanguage and to help build the rust ecosystem. So that's kind of, I guess youcould say, us and the doing our part. And then there are the people that are,contact us because they're building something that company. And they, need helpor, classic customer support style things.

And obviously we, we track those, justkind of like any other sort of like product organization would.  

Julian: Yeah. I, I, I'm, I'mnot sure if you have this insight, but I'd be curious to know, you, you aqua,you run it through the pandemic. Now we're facing our session is all theseexternal factors that a lot of companies are facing does that change whatpeople are building that, that you've seen and building with, with your.

Matthew: I mean, the, to saythat the, what's going on with the, kind of the economic climate it's theelephant in the room and, I think every recession's a little bit different. Soit'll be interesting to see how this one pans out. I guess I'm, I've beenthrough a couple of these, so I'm probably a little bit more pessimistic.

The most about what the Yeah. Adhere tois, is going to hold for us. After, living as, an adult through the.com crash.I was out in San Francisco on that before and after that. So that was prettyinteresting to watch in real time. Yeah. Went through the financial crisis. Ihappened to go to business school, graduate a couple years, two years beforethat all fell apart, so I had really good friends and classmates that.

Carrying their, their box of personalbelongings outta Lehman Brothers and standing on the corner of Wall Streetwaiting to take a taxi home for the last time. So yeah, I don't think that,we'll see what happens over the next couple years. Now having said that, I it'skind of the doom and gloom side of me or the cautious side, I guess you couldsay.

But also I was a reinvent in Las Vegasabout two months ago. and I mean, the, there's just nothing that's gonna stopwhat's going on in cloud. Yeah. And like applications that people are, arebuilding things going on with ai interconnecting thing. This is, it was likespirits were as high as I've ever seen.

And, you have If you kind of justabstract away when you know companies like Snowflake and AWS and, confluent,they're talking about their earnings report, I guess, it's maybe likenegatively affecting the stock price, but if you just look at the scale, whichthey're all operating at, and the growth that they still anticipate in arecession, it, it's amazing.

So yeah, this is it's inevitable.There's going to be more applications running in more distributed places, andthere will be more developers that need tools to go make that happen. GitHubjust passed a massive milestone. I can't remember the exact number was, but thenumber of developers on get registered developers on GitHub.

Like everything is growing so it's notgoing back. Yeah. It's never gonna get smaller. So like today is the worst.It'll. Forever and tomorrow will be the worst. It'll be forever. Or thesmallest. It'll be forever. So, yeah, I guess, to pick an industry to be induring a recession, I would say that cloud computing is a great one to be in.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, it seemslike technology. Obviously if you're not on the cloud as a company building inany form of technology, you're, you're behind. And unless you're, buildingservers in house, which is its own which is its own challenge, but it's sofascinating how much capability that the cloud has been able to, kind of offsetin terms of the load of the technology and be able to be so flexible andaccessible.

If everything kind of goes well, what'sthe long-term vision for.

Matthew: I mean, our, ourvision and mission is to be connecting all applications everywhere. We've areessentially a small, thin layer what we would've called 15 years ago, amiddleware style component that is connecting everything. So, that protocolthat enables everything to communicate with everything else, wherever it is inthe world with.

like, that's awesome. So, it's basicallywithout.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's so,that's so exciting. But also seems, scary as a founder to, to kind of, I guessroadmap out the, the long-term plan, if it, with its capability being so, Iguess limitless in, in a lot of ways. What are some like things that you try tofocus on in terms of the building process and how do you hone in on what'simportant?

Are you. Taking in feedback from yourdeveloper community are, are you seeing things in hypothesizing and testing asa founder? If I'm, in your seat, what are the things I'm doing to make sure I'mbuilding in the right direction? Being that there's so much yeah, there's somuch possibility out there.

Matthew: Yeah, we're we're,that's exactly right. You basically answered the question for me, which wasgoing at, going at it in pieces and very like, specific pieces because we are.because of how people build software, they build in stack. So we have companiesthat are adjacent to us in a developer's stack.

One of those adjacencies is Kafka andConfluent to move Da Kafka and Confluent have our amazing tool for moving,putting data in motion, right? Yeah. We build trust for data in motion, so we.An data and that we're launching in a week that allows developers that arebuilding with Confluent or Kafka, if they're using, if they're rolling theirown, that they can move data through this messaging platform that is end andencrypted, mutually authenticated with basically no code changes, solves amassive, massive problem for that community.

It. Well documented, well understood.Everyone nods when we go over to Confluent and talk about this mm-hmm. like,yeah, that's a major problem. All of our customers ask for that all the time.So yeah, we're going, that's kind of like an obvious place to go start, butfrankly, we could swim in that pond for a very, very long time.

Particularly at the, at the growth ratethat Confluent currently has. Yeah. The other use case that we're heavilytargeting is anything, anyone that's moving data into a data. We have a greatpartnership with influx data. If you're not familiar with them, they're a timeseries database. What we like about that as a use case is that it's quitefrequent that lots of applications that are remote are want to write data to ina time series format, cuz they're collecting data and kind of sending it backto a database.

Super fast growing company, awesomepeople. And they've just been a great design partner with us. So we also havean add-on so that people can move data into Influx db very simply and easily.And obviously it's, it's a good proxy for literally any database, whether it'sSnowflake or Mongo, or.

some SQL database, whatever it might be,Postgres over, crunchy data, what pick one. It's, we're still solving the sameproblem. People have an application, they need to move that data into thedatabase. They need to do it in trustful sort of way. That's where Ockam comesin.  

Julian: Yeah. It's incredibleto, to kind hear the, the. Not only the capabilities of technology, but thepartnerships you could build and, and how it, how it compounds on itself. Andit seems like everyone has kind of a mutual interest in, in the direction,that, that the technology is going versus each individual company andcomponent, which is, I feel like it, it, it's exciting, but also it's difficultbecause, a lot of times it's almost sometimes easier to simplify it and go inone direction, but there, there's so many ways you can.

I have some founder FAQs that I want toask you, so some rapid fire questions here. Yeah, go for it. What's, yeah.Yeah. What's the hardest part about your job today?

Matthew: It's, it's changed andI, I really like the model of giving away Legos. Probably my, my biggest job isget stuff started and then give it to someone else. And yeah, obviously thatcan be a challenge because it's easy to like, kind of like feel ownership forcertain projects or things.

But that's, that's why there's a team atOckam. We're building this group of people. They're highly. Skilled with that,specific expertises. So a lot of times, like I have to get stuff going and thengive it away to someone else that yeah, frankly, is better at me than what Istarted in the first place.

So, I guess there's, there's kind of a,a, a challenge in doing that.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. How do youas a founder kind of help delegate or, or communicate the, the value or not thevalue, excuse me, but the outcome that your expectation that you expect thatare in line with the company values, especially within a, a remote kind ofworking culture.

And there's some in office, I'm sure.But within that, how do you continue to foster and, and grow in, in a similardirection? How are you reengaging and, and keeping everybody on course, whichis a challenge for a lot of. As you have other responsibilities, but how do youkeep everything kind of on course?

Anything that you do structurally withinyour team or your org that keeps everybody aligned on the same mission?  

Matthew: Yeah. It, it allstarts with trust. I mean, it's, it's what our product does. It's what our teamdoes, is what we do with the community. It's, it's literally like when peopleare like, oh, what are the values of the company?

It's just one thing. It's the singleword trust. It's what is the kind of root of everyth. . And a lot of that istrusting people to do their job well. To trust them. Yeah. To do the thingsthat , I might not know how to what in most cases certainly don't know how todo and trust them to go do it.

That's why we have the team. Now,there's another component to this, which I guess is too lane, and I guess youcould say we're probably not overly creative in this area. We do OKRs, wecascade them through the organization so everyone knows why their piece is, isimportant, cuz it rolls up to an objective that rolls up to an objective.

like for example, lands this confluentCloud partnership that we're launching next week. Yeah. Everyone knows thatthat's, that's the reason why we're doing all the little pieces in our area isa specialty. And then we use another model that I really like came out of eBayoriginally. It's called RACI stands for.

We actually have a little bit of a spinout of the acronym is responsible approved. We, I prefer to say, . I think ifyou're in a situation where you trust people, it's much more about gettingalignment because two people have responsibility for two different things andneed to connect together.

So it's a matter of aligning on if wecan do A or B, which what are we gonna do? And y let's get aligned on what thatis. Consulting. Yeah. When you're surrounded by the smartest people. , you havea lot of resources to figure out, go figure out what you should do. So, if youdo the last thing, which is inform, say, Hey, here's a problem or a situationwho has expertise in this area?

Let's get in a room and talk about it.And then you trust the person that has responsibility to make the decision togo, make the decision. Off they go. So those are kind of like the kind, thefundamental tools that we use. Starts with trust. OKRs and then racy. Those arekind of our, our big tools that we use every day.

Julian: Yeah. One of thechallenges I've seen for a lot of founders is, is bringing on the right peoplebecause, the, the initial team is so critical to the, long-term success of, ofany company, especially if, if, hiring and rehiring people is just difficultchallenge to keep, continue to do so.

Bringing on the right people initially isso important. Where do you go to hire talented?

Matthew: Well, we hire slowand, and to the point that we are willing to trade off product velocity.Mm-hmm. , e everything, we will trade everything for getting the right peopleon the team. It's the, it's the most important thing.

And we will wait until we find theperson that we need for a particular role.

Julian: Yeah. And how do youdefine who that person is?  

Matthew: I mean, it, it,getting to know them, we probably, particularly with all the frantic hiringthat was going on over the past two years, we've probably had a little bit moreof a process than other companies. But also we, we've counterbalance that havebeen very open. We have we're a team of 15 people right now.

We're on four different continents.we've, we've, we, we literally look like at, at a global scale for the bestpeople in the world. And we, we make sure we get to know people as they jointhe team. We do something we call a starter project with everyone, which alsoso that they can get to know us, um mm-hmm.

and it, it, it happens to be this kindof self-fulfilling thing. The more smart people you get on the team, the morelike, I guess kind of like, As part of the interview process, the more opinionsyou have to figure out if the person that you're going to invite to join theteam is, is has the skill, the, the, desire to be on a fast moving startup.

The ability work asynchronously has goodcommunication skills and embraces our value of trust. So it's a process Ithink. Yeah, we have a team of 15 people. We've had, I haven't checked thenumber recently, but it's definitely over 5,000 people I've applied to join theteam. We're just a little team of 15, so, we're highly selective at the expenseof literally everything.

Julian: Yeah. If, if you wereto wave a magic wand right now, what's one thing that your business that, thatyou would like your business to have or need in this moment that that you woulduse for that one wish?  

Matthew: It's probably becausewe're about ready to launch this big add-on with confluent Cloud.

Right now we're looking for. Referencecustomer to go out and tell, go tell the world about what we've built withthem. Yeah. The that's gonna be an exciting day when, when everyone gets to seehow we can tell the story about someone. building something in production wheresomeone is using Ockam plus confluent.

That would be, that would be my magicwand to like, have happened today. I'm so excited. I don't even wanna wait thenext couple weeks to let it unfold in real time.  

Julian: I love that. I lovethat. Yeah, whether it was early in your career or now, what books or peoplehave influenced you?

Matthew: That's a goodquestion. Cuz you're, you're con conflating people, I don't know that wrotebooks with people. I do know that yeah. Hopefully influenced me. The, I I'llparse those. I I, I probably would just have to start with the beginning andstart. Family, friends people I knew in college people that supported me. Andjust like gave me the kind of like, confidence I guess to like kind of go dobig scary things with uncertain outcomes and, just kind of rely that yeah, onceI get in the room that I'll be able to figure it out.

So, and I think that that very muchcomes from. People I grew up with and around. Yeah. As it relates to books Ireally like, the two books that Ben Horowitz wrote Particularly hard thing about,hard things. I think that particularly to kind of draw this to the focus ofBehind Company, Lines.

I think that there's two ways of readingthat book, and I would be shocked if there's people that kind of fall in themiddle. I think like people probably either read the book and go, oh gosh, thatsounds horrible. Why would I anyone go start a company? Like when you read thehorror stories in that, in that book, or you read it and you get really excitedand go, yeah, that sounds really hard and that's what I want to do.

And I happen to read that book likeprobably. . I was probably reading it when I was quitting Microsoft andstarting Ockam, and that was the feeling I got from reading that book. It was,wow, this really exciting. His second book what you Do is Who You Are It?Mm-hmm. . I really like that because it creates this concept of your values arewhat you believe and your virtues are what you do.

I like the way he separated those into,into two different things. . And I think that that was a little bit of a kindof breakthrough of mind mental model for how value should be described. It'sone is aspirational, it's something you can believe in, and then there's howyou back it up. What do you do to Yeah.

Build trust in our particular case in yourproduct, with your community, with the people on your team with yourself. And Ifeel like that was, that like was a real big step function for me and kind ofhow I thought and saw the world. So I'll, I'll kinda leave. I could probably goon and on for a while if, if we wanna do on the topic, but I'll, I'll leave itthere with those those little insights.

Julian: I love that. And Iknow we're coming close to the end of the show, but I always like to ask this.Is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have or that you would want toshare outside of, obviously, we'll, we'll give a chance to give us your plugsand, and, and your late and your websites and where we can find you.

But yeah, anything I, I didn't ask youthat I should have, that you would've liked to answer?  

Matthew: Yeah, I'll just leaveit that we're, we're kind of building and open. In the open, our, our productis open source. Our website has like kind of the playbook for how we do things,our handbook and how we pay people, how we determine compensation.

All these things are, yeah, like kind offreely available. So, if anyone wants to reach out and chat with us, like,don't hesitate. Go do that. Like, yeah, we want to get to know. Set. That's whyI'm here. I want to go hang out with the smartest people in the world. And thatmeans whoever's listening to this come by and say hi.

Julian: I love that. Yeah.Yeah. And then where can we find you? Tell us your LinkedIns, obviously, your,your website is, outcome.io. But where are your communities? Where can we getengaged as an audience member and in it, a potential builder who wants to serveplayed around with the.

Matthew: Yeah, so you can finda on GitHub obviously we have discussions there. And they're linked to all thison our website. On LinkedIn. I'm Matthew Gregory. So actually it was one ofthe, one of the things where I actually was able to grab the name space, myname, way back in the day when LinkedIn started

So I'm easy to find on LinkedIn, justMatthew Gregory. And then on Twitter just OckamCEO. I tweet a little bit lessthan I used to, but I'm still there. Probably a little bit more voyeuristicabout Twitter than a, a contributor at this point. But yeah, I'm there.  

Julian: Amazing. Matt. Yeah,I'm so excited that.

To share with the audience, you not onlyyour story, your background and your experience, but also how you think aboutbuilding and, and how you really simplify. Not only the the value of, of thecompany, but you know, the, the what you aim to do with your customer as well,which is that one word trust as you, as you mentioned.

It's so simple, but I think it carries alot of gravity and, and, and you can use it across different orgs. So thank youagain for being on the episode. I, I hope you enjoyed yourself and again,thanks for being on the Behind Company Lines.

Matthew: Yeah. Thanks forhaving me. We'll have to do it again sometime.

Julian: Yeah.

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