The following interview is a conversation we had with Matthew O’Riordan, CEO of Ably Realtime, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $82 Million Raised to Build the Future of Realtime Experience Infrastructure

Matthew O’Riordan
Thanks for having me on. 

Brett
No problem. Super excited to chat with you. So, just to kick things off, can we start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Matthew O’Riordan
Sure. Yes, I’m Matthew O’Riordan. I’m actually originally from South Africa. I grew up tinkering with computers and didn’t think I’d have a career in computers, but sort of fell into web development and just loved it. And so I grew up in South Africa and what I found was it was quite early days of the Internet that there wasn’t really much going on in South Africa in terms of web development and things like that. It was like sort of late 90s. So I came over to the UK and I started my first business with a Co-Founder, so a company called E Consultancy, and we sold that about ten years ago now. So econsultancy was sort of like a subscription business, bit like a mini Gartner, really, but in the digital marketing space. So we sold research and things like that. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And I’ve been kind of always on the engineering know bearing, from sort of CTO roles to CEO roles in various different businesses. But quite frankly, I love coding, I love creating tech. It’s kind of what really keeps me going and. Yeah, and in the last few years, I’ve moved over to France now, so I’m living in the know and Ably Realtime is a remote first organization, so it’s all very possible, which is great. 

Brett
So I just finished reading a book on ultra running and a lot of it talked about the comrades ultra race in South Africa. So I have to ask, have you ever run that? Have you ever watched that? Is that a huge deal in South Africa? 

Matthew O’Riordan
It is a huge deal in South Africa. Every year it’s a huge event. And it’s from Peter Marisfoke to Durban. So I grew up in Durban. So one year it goes up and one year it comes down and. Yeah, no, it’s a huge event. It used to kind of almost run past my house, interestingly now actually, because living in Shoveni, there’s the UTMB. So UTMB is probably one of the biggest ultramarathon races and that also goes past my house in crowd. So no, I don’t do ultra running, but it’s some impressive stuff. 

Brett
Yeah, I’m surprised you’re able to withhold that, not go in, given that it’s been running or two major races running right by your house. Now, a few questions that we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. So first one is what Founder do you admire the most and what do. 

Matthew O’Riordan
You admire about know for me being. Well, ab. We’re a developer product for other developers, right? So we’re quite a techie product, but our customers are developers. And I think because of that, I really admire the Collison brothers, the founders of Stripe. They did something which was really impressive, which was they centered around give developers an amazing experience and build a business off that. And they managed to displace incumbents that had been around people like Worldpay, who’d been around for years and pretty much everyone transacted with them and suddenly they emerged. And it was all because they believed that if you give developers a delightful experience, then they will use your product. And that’s all they focused on. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And it was quite incredible because what it really showed the industry is that developers, even though they don’t hold the budgets, have buying power and stripe has really know an amazing example of that. 

Brett
Yeah, totally agree. And lot to admire there. What about books and the way we like to frame this? And we got this from Ryan Holiday. He calls them a quick book. So a quick book is a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you just approach life and think about the world. Do any quick books come to mind? 

Matthew O’Riordan
For know, there’s so many books and it’s kind of weird because they all sort of, there’s suddenly, I suppose, of typical startup type books that everyone reads and they all have a lot to give. But I think to your point, there’s two books that stick with me. I think the one is no rules. Rules. The Netflix story, I really like that because it really changed the way I thought about sort of ownership. Removing controls increases people’s belief that they own things. It kind of gets people to kind of make the right decisions. I remember in the book they talked about, they removed the idea of having a budget for taking someone out for dinner, taking a customer out. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And I think the example was they previously set a limit of spend $100 on a bottle of wine, and everyone would spend $99 on the bottle of wine. And actually, they kind of took away the limits, and people just bought a reasonable bottle of wine. And what they found was that it created ownership. People realized that they made the decisions and they had to own those decisions. So I kind of keep that thinking. Quite a lot in AB is that we try, and you don’t always get it right, but we try and empower people to make decisions and own those decisions. The other thing with no rules was this idea about talent density, and that once you get good people working with really good people, you get a really compounding effect. But one poor performer really impacts the whole team. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And I actually had someone at Ably Realtime recently make comments to me saying, I asked her what she was enjoying about Aidley, and she know, was it really about the people she worked with? And then I’ve got this question that I asked people as well in my sort of check ins, which is inspired by Ben Orbitz, which know, what is the one thing you don’t like about working at Haiti? And she kind of told me the story about someone she had worked with in the team who just kind of met the bar and didn’t push the bar right. And she said what really energized her was like working around other people who are constantly raising the bar. And then being in a know, in this project team with someone who wasn’t raising the bar just kind of drained her energy. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And it kind of really reminded this sort of talent density idea of neuros rules. So that’s the one. And the other one is amp it up by Frank Stutman, the Snowflake CEO. And I talk about this all the time. The company and the one thing up, a lot of it is incrementalism will kill your company. So it’s so easy to fall into that trap of thinking constantly add small features, improve things. But you really need radical trade ins. You need to kind of be thinking far bigger than constant little iterative improvements in the business. And that inspires me a lot. Like, I keep using that to kind of look at what we’re doing and say, hold on, is that big enough? Are we aiming for the moon? Or are we just sort of aiming to get better at what we do? 

Matthew O’Riordan
So, yeah, those are the books that are really essence my brain. 

Brett
Nice. Yeah, I really love that. Book from Frank Slutman. I think it’s very rare to have someone who’s an operator who’s actively running this big massive company to be writing books like this and releasing books. So it was really fun to hear from that perspective and not from the perspective of someone who’s just finished their career, retired, going into politics, or trying to build their legacy and writing a book for that purpose. This is very much an operational manual, and it was just so tactical and actionable, it was just a really fascinating read. 

Matthew O’Riordan
Yeah, I agree. I mean, it’s interesting with him because you would think it’d be a product to a tech guy who thinks like that, but he brings a lot of that sort of thinking that founders would bring, but it brings that to the organizations that he sort of embeds himself in. So, impressive. 

Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s switch gears here and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So to start things off, could you just explain to us the problem that you solve and then we can dive into how you solve that problem? 

Matthew O’Riordan
Yeah, so the problem we solve is we provide APIs for developers to build real time experiences. And so real time experiences are things like food, know, tracking order, it might be live chat, collaborating on a document, like Google Docs, playing games, a lot of sports events, live commentary and those sort of things. For us, we see them all as part of the real time experience. It’s this change between a static web where you kind of load an interface and that’s it until you interact with it, as opposed to sort of live interaction with other people or data or things that are happening around you in the world. And so we describe ourselves a real time experience platform. We provide sort of some low level APIs that are just developers can kind of embed into their applications. We also provide some high level APIs. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So if you’re thinking of like chat things that are more tailored to what chat problem spaces. And in order to do this, you really have to kind of solve quite a few problems. Because a large part of what makes up a real time experience is this idea that humans perceive things, anything. If you were looking at two windows on your screen at the same time and you were moving a mouse around anything under 100 milliseconds, it would look like it’s in real time, like everything’s in sync. And as soon as it goes greater than 100 milliseconds, you start to notice the lag. And so for us, everything we’ve engineered has been thinking about how do we keep that experience under 100 milliseconds so it feels like a real time experience, feels like you’re collaborating with other people. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And so to do that, we can’t circumvent the sort of physics and the speed of light. So if you’re in Australia and you are interacting with another user in Australia, then you can’t have your data being transferred to the US and back, right? So you have to have data centers a bit like cdms, you have to have points of presence globally where users connect and data flows through those points of presence. So one of the biggest challenges really we’ve had is how do we build a globally distributed system that ensures that users connect always to a pot that’s close to them. And so why that’s important is that developers shouldn’t have to think about that. Developers shouldn’t have to think about how do I solve those low latency problems, how do I do things at scale? They just want to use an API. 

Matthew O’Riordan
It’s a bit like the stripe example I was talking about earlier. Developers didn’t want to think about merchant accounts and all these sort of things that we used to have to deal with. They just want to call an API and build a credit card, right? And for us it’s the same thing. People are building these real time experiences and they don’t really want to think about those lower level problems. Not that developers can’t solve those problems, it’s just that they don’t need to solve those problems and we can solve them for them. So, yeah, that’s what we do. 

Matthew O’Riordan
I mean, probably a lot of your readers may not have heard of us, but that’s because I quite like the fact that we’re sort of under the hood, powering a lot of other services, reaching a few hundred million people a month now with that technology. And we’re powering sort of brands that probably your audience would have used, companies like HubSpot, Expedia, Webflow, Toyota, things like that. And for all of those companies, it’s powering things like chat, collaboration, audience engagement. 

Brett
That makes me think a little bit about Oracle. I think Oracle is also one of those companies that’s very much behind the scenes. Obviously they’re in the media sometimes just because of their size or because Larry Ellison does something obnoxious. But for the most part, the average person has no clue what Oracle is and what Oracle does, but they obviously play a critical role in a lot of different technologies. So, sounds very similar to, I mean. 

Matthew O’Riordan
I think obviously the analogy with Oracle is always think of sort of in many ways a sort of legacy technology company. But, you know, they keep surprising, and I mean surprising me in terms of how much they continue to evolve and grow and deliver stuff. So even though they’ve sort of been around for a long, I mean, not quite the success story of someone like Microsoft, they did such an amazing turnaround. But certainly Oracle were staying relevant, right? 

Brett
Yes. Now take us back to 2013. When you first founded the company. What was it about this problem specifically that made you say, okay, that’s it, let’s go build a company around this? Because I’m sure as an entrepreneur you probably had a lot of different ideas, right. And different problems you wanted to solve. So what was it about this problem specifically that said, this is it? 

Matthew O’Riordan
Yeah, it’s a good point about had lots of ideas. So what happened was I had just sold e consultancy and I spent about a few months thinking that I was going to not work again and retire and got bored within about literally about a month. I don’t quite know how I thought that was a viable idea. So I was kind of at home and I started just playing around with various different business ideas. So I spoke to quite a few friends and business colleagues just to kind of see what other ideas they had as well. And I started prototyping various different b to c ideas in everything from dating apps to a backlog management tool. And what I found was that at the time, I was trying to think about how do these apps stand out from other services that existed at the time. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And really for me, what I started to narrow in on was if you could create more collaborative live experiences, it would stand out. And of course, companies like Google really showed this for. I mean, I don’t know if you remember when Google Docs first came out. It was very simple. I mean, compared to Microsoft office, it was very naughty. But what it did, one thing that was amazingly good was it worked in the browser and it was collaborative and you could work with other people in documents, say time. And that one thing made it stand out from an amazingly established product, Microsoft Office. So I started to kind of narrow in on this. I believe that the real time collaborative experience was important. I started using various different open source technologies that existed. 

Matthew O’Riordan
There were a few cloud services, but they were all kind of born out of this idea that what Google had done with Gmail was probably the first company that stood out in terms of making the web real time. And what they did is they hacked some web technologies, they did something which basically called polling, and there was no way of communicating to the browser, but the browser would just continuously poll the server and say, hey, is the new mail, is there new mail? Is the new mail? Eventually the server respond, yeah, we’ve got some new mail. And that model kind of worked for the idea of if you’re just delivering notifications, then that’s perfect, right? Like if it takes a little bit longer to get a response, it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a notification. 

Matthew O’Riordan
If things arrive slightly out of order because you’ve sent multiple HTTP requests, well, it doesn’t really matter because they’re just notifications. And so what I found at the time when I was embedding other real time technologies is they were all built around the same premise, which is you’re delivering notifications and it doesn’t need to be mission critical. And my belief was that, well, actually if you want to deliver like a Google Docs type experience, you have to be able to depend on the transport. In the same way that no engineer is questioning whether TCP IP works, they just know that under the browser or under their application, a TCPR connection is created and it either succeeds or fails. And that’s the space you want to work in as a developer. You can just trust that it does what it says. 

Matthew O’Riordan
Whereas the existing web, I mean, real time technologies existed, you couldn’t get those sort of guarantees, right? You weren’t sure that messages arrived, you weren’t sure that the notifications arrived, you weren’t even sure they arrived in order. And so that was kind of what I set out to kind of solve. I was thinking, well, if I’m hitting these problems myself constantly in all the different applications I’m building, then surely there’s an opportunity here to kind of solve this for other developers. And that’s kind of when I met my Co-Founder, I’d been a sort of CTO my whole life, and, well say whole life, my whole sort of professional career in the UK, and thought I kind of had a good understand of engineering. 

Matthew O’Riordan
But I very quickly realized as soon as the movements are sort of distributed systems, it requires a very different level of technical depth. And so I met my Co-Founder and we started tackling how to solve this problem. And it was a very hard problem solve. It took us, I think, about three and a half years to build a system before we came to market. Certainly not something any business book would recommend, taking three and a half years to get your first product out. But in a way, that’s kind of what’s been our barrier to entry for other competitors is that it’s a very hard problem to solve to be able to provide low latency kind of service to developers that they can depend on in terms of guaranteed. 

Matthew O’Riordan
If you send an update and like a Google Doc, you’re guaranteed that it’ll arrive in order and you don’t end up having two users tensionly editing a document where what they’re seeing diverges. So that’s kind of the story. And yeah, we launched in about 2016 and it’s been a very interesting journey really in that what we found is that we thought we’d have a very large spread of lots of very small developers paying us $10 a month and a couple of big customers paying us a lot of money because they operating at scale. And what we found actually was that the larger companies or people doing things at scale really valued the sort of integrity that we can provide. 

Brett
Right. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So it matters more when you’re a larger company that we can provide the scale, that we can provide that integrity. So we kind of ended up in a space where a lot of our customers are really operating in a true Internet scale. And it’s nice to be sort of powering that. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. When I look on your website, I see a few big logos, or a lot of big logos, but just to call out a couple of them. So you have Toyota, Verizon, HubSpot, a bunch of others. 

Brett
Obviously every Founder dreams of having these big enterprise logos on their websites, but obviously in the early days, it’s hard to land logos like that. It’s hard to get a big enterprise. To give you a shot, what was that like for you? And maybe take us back and talk through some of those first big deals that you were able to land. How’d you pull it off? 

Matthew O’Riordan
There were a few tactics we used. One of them was, I believe that the way to get some presence when you’re sort of very small is to piggyback on the work that other competitors have done. So one of the early tricks we did, and I say a trick, but it’s when you’re smaller, you can use these sort of techniques is we knew people would be searching for alternatives of an established provider, right? And as long as we can rank organically as a result for that immediately a developer, if you’re ranking that gives them some trust that they’ve come across a credible player. And really what we did is we differentiated on technology, right? We had incredibly detailed documentation. We really stood behind how we designed the system and showed that off. We didn’t kind of hide that. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And what we found was there’s a lot of sort of hyperbole, right? Every company is going to say I’m better than you or better than the competitive at least. But what we realized was actually it’s far better to talk about the stats, like the performance of the system. So we came up with this thing called like the four pillars of dependability, and we define how the platform performs. So instead of saying to developer, our platform is better than a competitor, whichever competitor you compare us against, we would rather say, here’s the performance of our system, here’s the metrics that you can depend on, here’s the latencies you can depend on wherever you are in the world. And that kind of puts you in a space where developers can trust you because that’s kind of what developers want. 

Matthew O’Riordan
They want an authentic, they want to buy from other authentic developers. So that was kind of at least one of the things that we did that helped us. I think our first enterprise customer was CA technologies computer associates. It was inbound. I mean, most of our customers have come inbound. So again, it’s a bit like the stripe story. A developer goes, tries the know, prefers our product to one of the competitor products, whether that’s the experience they had with it, or whether it’s because of the properties, the sort of performance of the system. And it kind of goes up to a CTO type person in the organization who needs to approve it. And it was in the early days, I think a lot of developers put a lot of trust in us. We didn’t have the track record. 

Matthew O’Riordan
We had the technical chops and the evidence that we could kind of show that we had designed things the right way, but we didn’t have the track record. And it’s quite amazing, that sort of journey that we’ve gone through. And I think it’s always a challenge to get your first few customers. I think what we did that helped build trust is were human and we spoke to them and we kind of gave them our time and we helped them to design, architect how they would use Ably Realtime within their products and that gave them a level of confidence. So yeah, that’s the journey. 

Brett
And where are you today in terms of growth and adoption? Are there any numbers or metrics that you’re okay with sharing? 

Matthew O’Riordan
So in terms of sort of the journey, we raised our series B about two years ago. I mean, in terms of adoption metrics, the things we can talk about is volume. So we deliver about 600, 700 billion messages a month now to about 350,000,000 users. I think in some ways we’re still early stage, in other ways we’re mature. And it may sound strange, but we started off thinking about building Ably Realtime as a sort of low level set of APIs, that developers could build any sort of solution that they want. So if you think of, I mean, really it’s quite crazy the types of things people build on AV. We have one company who does an air traffic drone control system through to companies like HubSpot or Toyota who actually use this in racing. So telemetry and things like that. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So what we did is we kind of provide these low level APIs and this kind of allowed anyone to build any kind of real time experience. So in that regard, we’re quite mature in the journey because we’ve built something that truly differentiates, very scalable, and I’d say we got product market fits in that regard. But what we found is that a lot of developers aren’t necessarily thinking about I need a low level capability. What they’re actually thinking is I want to add chat to my application, or I want to add collaboration, or I want to add asset tracking because I want to show where the driver is. And so what we’re a little bit earlier in the journey in that regard is we’re starting to build products that are APIs sets that are really focused on specific use cases. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So if you’re building chats, we’ll give you a very specific set of APIs for that. We’ve got an asset tracking product specifically designed for delivery companies. So it gives them all the APIs for that. We just about to launch in the next month a collaboration product which we’re calling spaces, and that has a set of APIs that is specifically around showing where live cursors are, which things you’re editing at the same time. So they’re kind of thinking like a Google Doc type experience. So that’s where we’re kind of a little bit earlier in the journey in terms of starting to have these more use case specific product offerings when it. 

Brett
Comes to market category. What are your thoughts there? Is this a category creation play where you’re creating a new category, or is this really just reimagining and transforming and disrupting an existing legacy category? 

Matthew O’Riordan
No, I mean the low level sort offer we have today, which is our channels product. So it’s effectively a pub sub capability with a whole bunch of functionality on top that really is more of a product category creation. We have been working with Gartner on this and they put us into a category we don’t really agree with and I think that’s because they see us as just part of the pub sub messaging space. Whereas actually the reality is, yes, we happen to be pub sub under the hood, but what we’re doing is helping developers build real time experiences and applications. So in that regard it is a category creation story which has been challenging because that’s part of the problem we have with developers. Right? 

Matthew O’Riordan
The first thing a developer thinks when they try to solve one of these problems is they kind of start looking at their own tech stack and seeing whether they can, I don’t know, add Websocket support or something like that to the existing tech stack and build these things. Because unlike stripe, where you know you’re not going to build your own payment provider in this real time space, there isn’t this defined category as such. I think as we move up the stack though, it’s a bit easier. Right. Most developers know that there are APIs to build chat, they know that there are APIs to do location services and they start to do that research. So I think that’s where things are changing for us. 

Brett
How have you seen your messaging and positioning evolve over the last maybe twelve months? A lot of the founders that I’ve spoken to, they said that the message that was resonating with the market twelve or 18 months ago isn’t the message that’s resonating today. Have you seen something similar or what’s been your experience so far with your messaging? 

Matthew O’Riordan
I think for us as a company I would say we’re less affected by what’s happening around in the market. I think one of the shifts is there’s definitely more sensitivity to cost effectiveness, which maybe we probably wasn’t as much of the message before. The reality is that in a rapidly booming time, what you’re saying to developers and organizations is our product helps you move quicker, right? So if you want to grow your business, capture more of the market you use aidly because within days or weeks you can have a product up and running as opposed to months or years in this market it’s more about you could do this yourself but it’s going to cost you a lot more in terms of the resources you have. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So your headcount is going to probably cost you orders of magnitude more than what you’re going to pay in our service. And so there is a slightly different story. But I think for us the biggest change is that we have really focused more on developers. So in the last few years we’ve tried selling to, I suppose the more commercial person in the organization going in sort of top down and doing that selling. But the reality is we’re developer, product and our biggest advocates, our biggest champions will always be developers. So the shift for us has been more back towards what we started. We started very much a pure PLG developer first organization focused entirely on getting developers in, trying the product, seeing the value in it, and then later potentially having that expand opportunity because they’re a bigger organization. 

Matthew O’Riordan
We’re kind of rotating back to that which is our roots and it’s working really well. So for us what that means is we’re more authentic because that’s kind of what developers want. And I say authentic in terms of just clear communication, not like obfuscating anything, very open about any uptime issues we’ve had or incidents because that gives confidence to developers that we’re honest and we’re showing them what we’re doing. And I think we’re kind of taking this approach of we’re experts in our domain, but we’re humble. Right. We still understand that we don’t know everything, you know, but we are experts in our domain. And I think kind of what I’d mentioned about earlier, the sort of approach we took of the four pillars, we believe like we don’t tell developers, we show developers. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So instead of claiming we’re better at something, we show them what we can do and let developers are sort of, I think are unique segments in that developers naturally have curiosity. They want to kind of get to the answer themselves. I don’t think they want to be told the answer. So for us it’s about giving them the information they need and let them make that decision. 

Brett
What a guest told me a few weeks ago was that developers are allergic to marketing. They can see right through bullshit, they can see right through copy. They just want to know exactly what the product can do and how it can help them and then they want to work through the problem themselves or work through the product themselves. So, sounds very similar to what you’re describing. 

Matthew O’Riordan
Yeah, it’s exactly it. 

Brett
Right. 

Matthew O’Riordan
I mean, we have to always try and tone down anyone who puts any messaging in that kind of tries to make it sound like we’re better than another offering because we don’t know. Right. We don’t know what they’re comparing us against. They want to do that exercise, they want to do the comparison between the products. We just want to make sure they can kind of get to that. So, yeah, absolutely, they are alleged. But the thing that I say about developers, which is interesting, is that you’ll also hear that developers never want to talk to salespeople, and that’s not true at all. Developers just don’t want to be approached by salespeople. Developers will love to talk to salesperson once they understand that they value the product and they want to buy the product. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So it’s not that they don’t want to talk to people, they just don’t. 

Brett
Want to be approached like a lot of people. Now let’s talk a little bit about money and funding. So as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised $82 million, or over $82 million so far. Can you talk to us just about lessons that you’ve learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Matthew O’Riordan
Yeah, the last funding round was, I’d say, close to the peak in the tech space in terms of, well, lots of cheap money, really. So our series A and our seed rounds were both, I’d say, quite challenging. I mean, seed especially. So everything we heard at seed round was, well, what are you going to do if Amazon does what you do? What are you going to do if Google does what you do? And I kind of always sort of laughed because you think, well, what is any business going to do if Amazon does what you do know? 

Matthew O’Riordan
And I think the lesson there is that it know, like any company that goes up against Amazon and the likes, it’s about being quite narrow, focused and being very clear on what you’re doing and passionate about it, I think is how you beat the cloud vendors. You don’t try and compete against by building a big portfolio of products and competing against them because you’ll never be able to do that at scale. So I think the seed, it was very much, we’ve managed to find investors who believed in us and believed in what we’re doing and we’re willing to take the fund. I think with series A, we had sort of already had some, at least a track record of some enterprise customers, but it was still, I think, still quite challenging in terms of having sufficient funding for where our ambition lay. 

Matthew O’Riordan
Whereas with the series B, we had very solid metrics. I mean, things at this time of series B, we had very good growth. I think what we had was exceptional net revenue retention. And that was. It’s really powered by two things. We had a bunch of customers who integrate us into their product who in the old days, we used to worry because we wouldn’t hear back from them. But the reality is, what it was, is that they were building, integrating our product. It just worked and it meant they could move on to the next challenge. And what that also meant is we just got naturally, consumption just continued to increase because they’ll continuously embed us other parts of the product. A lot of the businesses that were buying us were kind of rapidly scaling organizations as well. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And then, of course, with COVID we got acceleration as well then because a lot of businesses were moving online. And so were able to kind of help some legacy businesses, but also other businesses that were just thriving in this environment. So for me, series B was probably the easiest round for us, but it was because we just had incredibly solid numbers that backed it. So I think the early days, it was very much. I think the investors believe in the people, right, the leaders. And that was what we sold. We sold the story, our track record in previous businesses, and that’s kind of what you have to get them to buy into, I think, in later stages. The reality is you have to focus on getting healthy SaaS metrics. I mean, that is what we stay on top of all the time. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And for us, for our next funding round, that is what we focused on too, right? We want to be at a place where capital efficiency is now suddenly something that every investor will talk about, which we just didn’t hear about two years ago. I mean, it would be mentioned, but it wouldn’t be paid attention. It was kind of growth at all costs. And now pretty much every investor is looking for a different set of metrics. They want a business that has some route to profitability. May not be profitable at the time, but definitely has a route to profitability. You can’t have crazy acquisition costs that mean you don’t have a sustainable business. And generally you just have to be capital efficient, right? So that you again have this park that as the growth continues, you will eventually become a profitable business. 

Brett
Now, let’s just imagine that you were starting the company again today from scratch. Based on everything that you’ve learned so far, building the company, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself? 

Matthew O’Riordan
I mean, it’s probably quite unique to a developer first business. But I would have said investing more in the community, develop community is much like any other social community. You’ve got developers talking about a product. As long as you can get developers acting as advocates for you and going out to events and talking about your product, or even presenting things at events, chatting about things on Twitter, your rate of acceleration, your growth is going to be far quicker. I mean, we did invest in community, but I don’t think it was our primary goal. I think our primary goal was let’s build an amazing product and let’s make sure it delivers what it says and is measurably better than everything else that’s out there. But quite frankly, that’s not enough. You need developers to understand that and to be taking that to the community. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So I think that the advice I would have given myself was to kind of have a more social strategy, a developer social strategy from day one, and get more engagement in the product from the community. 

Brett
Final question for you, since we’re almost up on time here, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s that big picture vision that you’re building? 

Matthew O’Riordan
I mean, for us, we believe that real time experience is quite a broad area. And what we envisage is that today if you go and build a chat API, for example, you’re really only solving one bit of the real time experience problem that consumers expect. Like consumers just now expect everything to be in real time. They expect you to kind of have notifications and to collaborate and see other people editing things and to be able to chat to people and all of these things. And what we believe is that as an organization, if you start delivering some part of a real time experience, then your customer is going to suddenly expect that everything becomes real time. And our vision for the future is that you come to Ably Realtime for one thing. 

Matthew O’Riordan
So you come because you need chat, but you stay with Ably Realtime because we provide all of those components within the real time experience space. And I think if we can capture that, I think what we do then is we differentiate from the point solution. So we probably will never be as good as the best chat API provider that’s out there because that’s all they focus on. But as a company, if you’re going to be dipping your toe into, well, I need to start adding real time experiences into my applications. You know that if you come to ably, we’ll have a very credible chat offering. But what we also have is functionality to kind of do your location tracking and do notifications. And enable collaboration. And I think that’s a very compelling offering. 

Matthew O’Riordan
And if you look at companies like stripe, going back to the Collison brothers again, it’s kind of what they did. They started with payments, I mean, that’s all they did. And they did incredibly good job at that. And now they’ve really broadened out into everything to do with the sort of Internet commerce space, right? So everything from fraud detection to invoicing and billing, it’s a pretty broad offering and I think it’s the same for us. We don’t want to broaden our focus away from real time experiences. We want to think about everything that you would be doing in the real time experience space and provide a sort of unified set of APIs to do that. It’s quite exciting that we’re reaching hundreds of millions of people. 

Matthew O’Riordan
I think the thing that really excites me personally is the idea that we started this company, my Co-Founder and I. I think we had some big visions, I mean, big aspirations for what we wanted to do. But the fact that we’re kind of approaching half a billion people, I think if we can kind of get into the billions of people sort of territory, then I think that’s quite a nice. Like as a Founder, I think knowing that we’re sort of, I don’t know, 20, 30% of the planet relying on technology that we’ve been providing would be something that I think in the next three to five years will be amazing to kind of have that achievement. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, love how you’re building and I really love the approach that you’re taking here and the problem that you’re solving. Matthew, we are up on time, so we will have to wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in and just want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision. Where should they go? 

Matthew O’Riordan
Just go to ably.com, ably.com and have a look. And I’m on Twitter under Matthew urid and have a look at the notes of the document because my surname is hard to spell. But yeah, please do follow along. 

Brett
Yeah. As I was preparing for the interview, I was trying to figure out how to say it and I found a few different interviews. Everyone was saying it differently, so that was why I avoided saying your last name at the start. It was a bit confusing. We’ll link to it in the show notes so people can find you easily. Matthew, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. This was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it. 

Matthew O’Riordan
Brilliant. Thanks a lot. Thanks having me on. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries listeners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.