The following interview is a conversation we had with Johnny Dallas, CEO & Co-Founder of Zeet.co, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $6M Raised to Power the Future of CI/CD & Deployment.
John Dallas
Thanks for having me, Brett. Glad to be here. Excited to hide what we’re building and meeting more of your audience.
Brett
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it as well. Let’s go ahead and just start off with a quick summary of who you are and maybe a bit more about your background.
John Dallas
Yeah, happy to. So, as you said, I’m Johnny Dallas. I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Zeet.Co. We are a cloud agnostic DevOps automation platform. So we basically help teams take their code to their cloud, everything from CI to CD to observability monitoring all in one place. We can dig into it more, but my background I started working in startups when I was about 14 years old. Born and raised in San Francisco, I worked at a company as a front end engineer, then became their backend engineer and eventually their one man DevOps team. When I was in high school, I built an internal DevOps platform that enabled that company to go from one AWS region to every AWS region and thousands of concurrent EC.
John Dallas
Two instances with no srs, no DevOps team, none of the resources you typically have, sold that company to AWS and built their internal tools for a couple of years before quitting that job to bring some of these internal tools and this idea of DevOps platforms to everybody with Zeet.Co.
Brett
How old were you when you sold that company?
John Dallas
I think I was 17 when that company got acquired. And I remember that because during the acquisition process we signed everything and they had to take an extra months to figure out could we legally hire a miner? We’ve never done this. So I was briefly Amazon AWS youngest engineer and they weren’t quite sure what to do about the beer on tap in the offices and things like that with me.
Brett
Are you even able to sign contracts when you’re under 18 or how does that work?
John Dallas
Yes, I was able to sign my employment contract with parental consent. I wasn’t a Founder of that company, I was just the director of operations. So I wasn’t as involved on the kind of a legal side of selling the company, just on the employment side. Okay, got it.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense then. What was that experience like working at Amazon and then at Twitch?
John Dallas
Very different than startups. You’ll be shocked to hear I went from a 14 person company to a 2500 person game of Twitch. You know, there’s pros and cons to any company change, but the biggest thing is going to be that scale difference means you have a lot more processes, you have a lot more tools, means you can do your job much faster, much more efficiently, but it’s a little bit harder to do other jobs. So kind of get constrained to what you do. I was becoming a better and better engineer there, but I wanted to be a better and better builder and maker and creator, which is why I wanted to start my own company.
John Dallas
But you got to learn a lot of great processes, a lot of great tips, a lot of great tactics, everything from Amazon’s customer obsessed culture to some of their software tools on the side for deploying at the massive scale that Amazon does, which was really foundational to the thought process that led to starting this company.
Brett
What about founders that inspire you? Who’s the most inspiring Founder that you’ve worked with or met?
John Dallas
I’m actually a part of this group in San Francisco which is home to some of the most inspiring founders I know, called founders Inc. It was basically started by the CTO of that last startup, a guy named Ferkon and Founder Zinc. Honestly, my answer is probably Furkon. He’s a pretty impressive Founder who built applovin, a publicly traded IPO company that does mobile game ad networks. Now is building third web, a massive web three company as well as founders Inc. I think the reason I choose him is not just extremely smart and extremely technical, but he is both ambitious and generous, which I think is a really important combo for any Founder who has made it and something that we don’t talk enough about of.
John Dallas
You should have the ambition, but you should also make sure that you’re giving back to the other founders around you, helping other people get to the same spot you were. So he’s been a mentor for me for many years and I look up to him quite a bit on the Founder aspects. So I think that combo of ambition and generosity in Furkon is probably my go to Founder that I look up to.
Brett
So I just made the connection to what company that is. So that’s Bebo. And that would be the company that Sean Parry was Founder of and CEO of. Is that correct?
John Dallas
That’s right. Yeah. Sean hired me when I was 14. I, quote, emailed him about 30 times and told him, hey, let me come and sit and watch what your devs do. I’m a kid who wants to learn how to code. I don’t know how to do it. And he sat me down the first day and said, yeah, I know you think you’re here to sit and learn, but you need to build me Buzzfeed quizzes. By the end of the day, you have 12 hours. Good luck. And I did it. I gave him a very shitty prototype, but it was something. And he said, great, you can come back the next day. And that was the start of where I am now.
Brett
Jeff, I think he’s talked about you a few times. Not by name, but he’s talked about, I think you’re nagging getting hired there. I listened to his podcast, my first million. Do you ever listen to that?
John Dallas
Yeah, podcast. Yeah, I think he’s. He shouted us out a couple times on that. He’s a great guy.
Brett
That’s awesome. What about books that have had a major impact on you and the way we like to frame this? We got this from Ryan Holiday. He calls them quake books. So Quakebook is a book that, like, rocks into your core, really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind?
John Dallas
Yes. I think founders, inherently, we are very personal, growth oriented, and just growth oriented generally. And so a lot of, I expect the answers that you get to this are self help books, business books, that type of thing. I’d actually probably say a Sci-Fi book, the Dark Forest or three Body Problems series is a pretty famous Sci-Fi series. Great, great story about the idea of other life and how it interacts with humans. But I read that in the last few years as I was kind of starting z, and it changed how I think about scale, and it changed how I think about our place in the universe. And I think that one actually motivated me to be a lot more ambitious in a way that didn’t quite expect going into it. I wouldn’t say too much to spoil the book, but.
John Dallas
But the Dark Forest or three Body problem trilogy is a must read if you haven’t read it.
Brett
Yeah, I’ve not read it, but more and more, I’m hearing founders answer that question, and they talk about Sci-Fi books. It’s a category of books that I’ve not really explored much, but you made a pretty compelling case there. So I’ll give this one a shot. How long of a book are we talking about here?
John Dallas
Oh, it’s in the hundreds of pages, but not thousands. It’s a read and it’s a dense book, but we’re imagining the future, right? That’s what your job is as a Founder. Think about what could be and think about the past between where we are now and that eventual future world. And so I think definitely agree. I see more and more founders go e to Sci-Fi just because it’s high clarity descriptions of different future worlds. And our job is all to get as good as we can at describing with high clarity a future state that we see and then build your path to that. So it’s an inspiring resource. I think the whole genre of Sci-Fi.
Brett
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Brett
Let’s switch gears now.
Brett
Let’s dive into Zeet and everything that you’re doing there. How we like to begin this part of the interview is really focusing on the problem. So at a high level, what problem are you solving?
John Dallas
So I told you a little bit of my story and the background, the context. To answer that question, ill dig a little bit deeper into some of the final moments of Bebo there and what I did there. So I mentioned I was their kind of one man DevOps team, their one man director of operations, running all of the scaling and build system and everything. Basically other than writing the application code for our dev team, I was doing that while I was in high school and we had a very specific problem at VIPO, which is were scaling very quickly and we had a very infrastructure heavy product. We have an SRE team to deal with it. We are going from one Aws region to 16 AWs regions. We’re going from hen EC two instances to 10,000 Ac two instances and were crashing every day.
John Dallas
For those unfamiliar, typically in a DevOps or an SRE site reliability engineer environment, we have somebody who’s on call. I could not be on call while I was in high school. I would get paged in all of my finals. My teachers hated it. It would not work very well. We needed to have some automated solution, some automated platform that gave our developers who didn’t know AWS, who didn’t know infrastructure and they didn’t want to learn it, the ability to still do the DevOps task, do the infrastructure tasks. That problem gave devs the ability to do infrastructure is really the core of my entire career and the core of what we solve at Zeet.Co. I solved it back at Veebo.
John Dallas
By building a platform, our devs could just write a very simple JSon blob describing how their GitHub repo built and what environment variables are needed, and our system take care of the rest. And we’ve built upon that idea to build a self serve multi cloud deployment platform. With Zeet, you essentially link your cloud account and any developer can suddenly spin up production ready applications with EICD. Auto scaling, zero downtime deploys. Three checking all of the production checklist things that you would expect from a really mature DevOps company, even if you’re only a two person dev team.
Brett
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Brett
How long did it take until it started to feel like things were working? I see that you launched the company in October 2020. Did it feel like you had product market fit right away, or when did things really start to click?
John Dallas
So actually we didn’t mean to start the company. It was more of a happy accident where we built myself and my Co-Founder, Zihao, whos our CTO, him and I built the initial version of Zeet over weekend because we wanted to work on some side projects and we didn’t have access to the same internal tools we’d gotten used to in our previous jobs and really wanted some platform to simplify all the deployment process. So we built it for ourselves. We showed a few friends and over the next few weeks they started sharing it with more and more of their friends. And more and more people started signing up and trying to use the platform. It got to the point where I realized there was more people talking to me about this thing than anything else I was doing.
John Dallas
And I quit my job and decided to turn into a real company. So it’s a bit of an odd answer, but day one were seeing activity and we knew that there was something here, arguably day negative 300. We had built this at previous companies and so we knew that this problem could be solved in this way. And we’ve just been basically chasing the customer since.
Brett
When it comes to growth and adoption. What does that look like?
John Dallas
Yeah, so like I said there, the initial adoption is very much word of mouth and Founder network led. Since then, though, we now have support. About 70,000 developers deployed across dozens of different cloud accounts, dozens of cloud providers. Currently, many of those devs, individual devs, many of them startups and some of them larger enterprises as well.
Brett
What do you attribute that level of success? I’m sure any Founder listening in would love to be able to answer that question in that way, but most don’t have 70,000 developers using their products. What have you done right and what have you gotten right to really rise above all the noise and get developers using your tools?
John Dallas
It’s a bit of a trope, but the start of it is very much we knew that this needed to exist because were building it for ourselves. We are our own customers and we’ve built this thing multiple times. All of Zeet runs on Zeet and so that gives us really good empathy for our customer. I think even if weren’t bonus for ourselves, empathy for the customer is the most critical thing. It’s how you’re going to know what the right next thing to build is. And as long as you make something that one person likes, there’s probably a person out there who wants it and you keep scaling that.
John Dallas
I think the other piece, especially for a dev tool product, you are going to have lots of different people who look at it a lot of different times and lots of different kind of spots in the buyer journey. We’ve always had a free tier and we will always have a pre tier because we know that sometimes your dev, whos going to be the decision maker, comes in midnight on Friday and wants to play with it or signs up at the weekend just to kick the tires a little bit. As a dev tool, we knew that making it so anybody could try out the product and get a taste of it, no matter what level of sensation they were at. We were really critical. So those two things, empathy for devs and a researcher.
Brett
When it comes to your market category, how do you think about your market category? I think I introduced you as a DevOps automation platform, which I stole from a media headline that I saw. Is that the category or what is the category?
John Dallas
Yeah, the category has been a bit difficult for us and honestly, the way that we talk about it right now is we have a place to deploy, operate and improve your cloud infrastructure across your clouds. Part of the insight that we have into the developed industry is DevOps is very verticalized. You see there’s a CI category, there’s a CD category, there are container registries, there’s a bunch of different security scanning tools, there’s monitoring tools, there’s observability tools, there’s compute runtimes. And what you end up doing at a company is you build internal services or internal tools to map and glue all these variables together. And the result is something like whatZeet provides, an all in one platform actually mapping across all these tools.
John Dallas
We sit horizontal to the DevOps industry, which means some people see us as a CI product, other people see us in cine product, other people see us as an entire deployment platform. We allow you to pick and choose which pieces you’d like to adopt, though we tend to a few categories in that way.
Brett
And then what about the competitive landscape? How are you positioned?
John Dallas
DevOps is mature, DevOps exists, and there is quite a few different companies already in the DevOps space. I think our key insight is very much this horizontal nature. There are very few companies that provide a horizontal experience. There’s a few startups at similar stages to us who are going after this. But the idea really came from the platform as a service industry, which was the heroku, the Vercels, the renders, the railways of the world that provide a managed deployment experience for a lower end market. Devs who you’re starting to deploy. But we see ourselves compared to those two types of companies quite often platform as a service, companies that solely apply into their own cloud, and a few of the other platform in your cloud, companies that are in the startup stages, like us.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 6 million today. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
John Dallas
Yes, we raised about 6 million initially from founders Inc. The community I mentioned earlier raised capital and most recently Sequoia Capital invested in us. I think the biggest thing i’ve learned about fundraising is honestly the only thing that matters is customers. This is a bit of an amazonism of customer obsession, but the way that we actually got invested by Sequoia was not a fundraiser, were not actively seeking investment, were not going out to raise. We had Sequoia doing some diligence on this category generally, and were talking to a bunch of competitors and many of them had customers leave their platforms and join ours. Sequoia reached out to us independently and said, hey, we’ve talked to all your customers already, they love you. We’re really interested in the space, can we learn more?
John Dallas
So staying focused on the customers and just make the thing work was actually what ended up leading us to the best investment so far, other than pursuing funding explicitly.
Brett
Let’s imagine you were starting the company again today from scratch.
John Dallas
What would be the number one piece.
Brett
Of advice you’d give yourself?
John Dallas
I heard this quote recently, and I think it’s a great quote, but all problems as the day are people problems. I think that I was blessed with a really great Co-Founder. This is our third company working together and so we know how to work together very well. And I’ve learned so much more about hiring and choosing the right people to surround yourself with that. I think I would spend a lot more time thinking about the people where I could do this again than I did this time. I’m happy with the choices this time, but I think that all problems end up being a problem of culture and a problem with people. And so making sure that it’s those first few hours are really those all stars and raising the bar is something that I figured out.
John Dallas
I would start from being that supposed to have been figuring it out while doing it.
Brett
Next time, final question for you, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building?
John Dallas
The future and the vision that we really see is having all of your cloud services in one place. There’s so much power in cloud, there’s so much power in AWS, there’s so much power in Datadog. These tools exist, industry exists, but they’re inaccessible to most of the world because you have to be a DevOps infrastructure expert to really get the utility out of them. We imagine a world where any dev can go and very quickly spin up Websco applications, or more recently applications, and deploy like some of the best companies do in a matter of minutes. And a fully integrated cloud platform that sits across everything from deploying to observability and monitoring, can bring productivity improvements to the average dentist that we can continue.
Brett
Amazing. Love the vision. All right, Johnny, we are up on.
Brett
Time, so we’re going to have to.
Brett
Wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in and want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
John Dallas
Yes, I’m on Twitter. Johnny Dallas. You can also check out our website, z co. Those probably the two best places to find me. I guess Twitter is now x, but you know what I mean. Come check out our website. I’m also available in that support chat. So if you have any specific questions, throw something into our product support chat and I’ll get back to you.
Brett
Awesome, Johnny, thanks so much for taking time to chat.
John Dallas
Thank you. Appreciate you having me. On.
Brett
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