The following interview is a conversation we had with Ron Efroni, Flox, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $28M Raised to Empower Developers with Reproducible Environments That Span the.

 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Hey Brett, super excited to be here. 

Brett
Yeah, I’m super excited as well. So I see that you were in 8200, the infamous unit there in Israel. So I’d love to start there. What was the experience like being in unit 8200? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
And yeah, definitely. I think its so funny that you mentioned that. Right when I started my first startup, I don’t think anyone knew what 8200 was. So this time around was definitely funny. I think were raising our first round as well. I was like, wait a second, it says here is really intelligence. Was that 8000? Yeah, im definitely happy to share a bit of a tidbit into the unit. I think it was pretty much what you would imagine at the ground level, a very aggressive startup would feel and operate like. Right. We were recruited as 18 year olds. Most of us went through some very rigorous training that involves computers to want some level or some niche. And then were thrown into teams to tackle specific mission critical areas. And I think that was kind of like the overarching feeling to it. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
So a bunch of young folks coming out of like super deep courses trying to tackle mission critical projects. All of a sudden, life on the line, everything was kind of super high criticality and you’re only 1819 or 20 and kind of your throne, that huge responsibility into your hands. 

Brett
So you immediately come out of the military and then you start a company. What’s that like when you go into running a startup? Obviously running a startup is hard, but it has to feel a little bit like a joke. I’d have to imagine when you compare it to what it’s like to be in the military. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
I think it’s a mix. So for context, I had to start up right after the military and then continued on and Flox as my second company. But coming out of that unit into a startup. I think there was definitely areas where were like, this is easy. So it’s like you grow conditioned to kind of dealing tough skin, having a lot of ups and downs and a lot of mainly downs and kind of just continuing on and picking yourself back up, but there’s still a lot of unexpected hard items. Right. Cause if you think about it, when in the unit and when you’re in the military, you’re kind of thrown in with a bunch of folks that have a similar objective, a similar mission, and they need to go and complete it. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
You’re inside of a tent, you make a decision, but when you walk outside of the tent, you’re all kind of soldiers, whether it’s on a keyboard or on the field, and you’re walking down the right direction. I think that’s where the first kind of big surprise for me in the real world outside of the military was where it’s like, oh, wait a second, we’re hiring folks and we’re having these discussions and we’re not always all walking in the right direction. There’s no kind of like, this is the target, go walk 500 meters to reach it. There’s a human emotional aspect to it. There’s a lot of management aspects that did not come off as like, oh, this is super easy all of a sudden. 

Brett
Let’s skip ahead then to your time at Facebook. What was that experience like? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Definitely. So Facebook was quite incredible. So at Facebook I led developer products and experiences. Everything that developers were kind of putting their hands on. One of my product managers or one of our engineering teams was on top of everything from our own flavors of versus code android studio, like the ides that developers build into, all the way onto bigger and more complex projects. And I think the time of Facebook was very enlightening to me. I think that was my first time going into a huge organization with a huge area of impact. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
But the pace of how we prioritize things suddenly shifted from a, we’re in a startup and we’re trying to make very incremental, very aggressive gains against a very constrained budget to I want you, Brett, to look at that big picture and tell me what’s the best way to get to that North Star. Not the fastest, necessarily, not the most cost efficient, the best. Now lets go work backwards from that and define how we want to go about it. So I think for me that showcased a lot of very interesting points that I wasn’t exposed to and definitely a lot of learning around building tools and products for the whole developer ecosystem and what makes us all tick there, Trey. 

Brett
So youre there for almost two years and then you of course leave to found your current company today. Flox, what was going on inside your world? Why then what was it about that time that made you say, yep, that’s it, I’m going to leave. I’m sure a well paying job, a great job at Facebook to go start a startup. Like what happened to made you want to make that leap? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Yeah, definitely. Other than I think probably some syndrome that all founders have and that it shit the back of the neck that you’re like, got to do something. The story back then was that I was building up with a team, something called developer on demand, and were replicating a tool chain on. I’m not going to go super technical, feel free to dig deeper if you want me to. But were replicating what’s called like a developer environment in the cloud and were trying to hook it up to local machines so that developers can work this out of their laptops. The main goals there were like things like reducing the time it takes to build a software application, the cold build from 45 minutes to 30 seconds or something pretty substantial. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
If you kind of take into Facebook’s equation when you have 3000 engineers working on this area of the project, each one saving over 40 minutes a day, is quite critical. And as I was traversing into it, I was just astonished by how complex it has become for us as engineers to just write the code and define the things that we need in order to just have our code run wherever we need it to run. Not only did it become extremely complex, but it became just a monstrosity in terms of how many layers were on top of something that used to be very simple like write the code, launch it, have it work out of some server somewhere. Now we have different metal types, we have different oss, we have huge reliance on enormous pockets of open source software that we don’t even build. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
It’s someone else that has built. And that complexity just made me realize that there must be a different solution that we can utilize to just work from the ground up instead of adding another layer on top of it. And that’s what brought me close to the whole ecosystem and the technology called Nics or Nixos, as I was diving into Nixon Nixos, which by the way, today is the largest open source package repository in the world. Top ten on GitHub, so amazing community. I was connected with my now Co-Founder Michael, who used to lead, build and release engineering for de Shop, one of the larger quant funds in New York. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
And the backstory there is that he actually tried to bring the same technology, Nix, into the firm in 2017, and Nix wasn’t very usable, so he built a layer and that layer became flux for very similar reasons. And that’s where we decided to partner up. D Shaw had an internal venture builder called Discovery that they kind of started to work around the internal project and look me in. And then Michael and I decided that this is amazing, could have huge impact on the software industry and spit it all out into our own company, our own startup flux with a lot of help from the crew back at Discovery and a lot of our partners. 

Brett
Trey, what’s the relationship like then with the Nicks community? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
The relationship. So theres a few facets to the relationship, right? A its great. So I today im a board member and treasurer of the Nixos foundation, Flox from the get go. Just ideologically, when we started it, I knew that Flox was going to be investing a huge amount back into the open source that doesn’t necessarily actually have a very aggressive ROI for the company or return any cash value for it. Its just that I think Nics really is the future and im obviously highly biased. And whatever we can do and I can do to make that happen, then I want to make sure that we do that. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
So today, other than me being part of the foundation board and being involved in a lot of projects across the board, just like we just ran Nix con for the first time in North America, a lot of the top contributors to Nix are also part of the Fox team. And in my mind, also at the product level, Nick’s is part of what makes Flox tick. So the more users that use flux, I would hope that we can also convert them or a part of them to become next contributors. 

Brett
Is there an open source company that’s really inspired you in terms of their approach, how they’ve brought their technology to market? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
I think so. I think there’s a few open source companies that I kind of look towards to or learn from. I think it’s not just about the company because companies kind of also sometimes have changed. It’s also, for me about individual founders a lot of times, and in my mind, an example here would be like Hashicorp with Mitchell, Ashimato, and Armat. And a lot of times kind of looking at their early days and how they grew the company and how much they cared about their communities and how they put the communities kind of front and center for me is a huge inspiration point. And personally, I’m also blessed to every so often annoyed Mitchell enough to learn a bit. So I think that’s what I’m looking at in terms of ideology as well. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
It’s like, I believe that any company building on top of an open source community or project needs to build on top of it and not to the side of it. And just to clarify what I mean by that is like open source, right? It’s like a bunch of folks all together doing something beautiful, which is, I really care about this. I want to contribute my time to it and then open it up to the world. When I view what Flox is doing, it’s like, for me, flux is then extending nicks and making more approachable to the masses. So it’s like when I wear my Nick’s hat, my foundation hat, I’m all about how do we continue to keep Nix and the ecosystem around Nix a green field and welcoming to anybody and cutting edge, right? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
So in my mind, we just ran Nix con and we had talks ranging from Nixon particle accelerators to like nics and genome studies. That’s what open source is about. Flux kind of sits on top and says, I want to make it more accessible to folks that are not on that cutting edge, to folks that just want to use it without going so deep. And ideally, like I said earlier, brings more people into the deeper side of the pool there. The areas I just prefer less so is like building on the side of an open source where you start kind of competing with the community and that’s where I think that’s just a net loss because we can kind of build on top of each other and benefit each other. 

Brett
What about your marketing philosophy? How would you describe your marketing philosophy? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
I think the marketing philosophy is, again, another kind of like honored, blessed moment. I’m super blessed to have our marketing guru in house, Ross Turk, and I think I’ve learned a lot from him. I think in general, the marketing philosophy I have today is I want us to meet our users, our developers, where they’re at when they look at Flox or hear about Flox or read anything about Flox, I want the individual to feel like they’re hearing their own voice and what we’re talking about. So less flashy, I would say more technical, more pinpoint into exactly what problem we came to solve for you and how you can go about it. And the quicker I can bring you to recognizing or feeling that value or that magic at the ends of your fingertips, the better. 

Brett
In terms of marketing, what about messaging? How have you seen the message evolve? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Quite incredibly. Nix is not just complex I think one of the biggest issues we’ve always had and are still working on at the community level is how do you message something so massive and so disruptive at the software scale? So it definitely was also something that we’ve been playing around a lot at flux. And I think, bottom line, were able to find just adjacent areas that developers and our target ICP are on top of today that we can speak to directly. So for us, it was kind of landing on just an example here, and I know might be a bit more technical. It’s like blocks is what you’ve always wanted your package manager to be coupled with a virtual environment, right. And the simpler the messaging is, the better, but you don’t want to become so simple that the value becomes ambiguous. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
So there’s like a very tight line, especially for our space, where you want that simplicity, the conciseness of it, to mix with understanding where it meets. Me as a potential user, why should I care? 

Brett
What would you say is working in marketing today and what’s not working? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
I think working in marketing today is definitely very targeted for us. So it’s very dependent on us being able to come into a software ecosystem, whether it be a language ecosystem like Python, or an ecosystem that’s wider, like AI, and getting very deep with their specific problem sets that we that are unique in their realm. We have this general problem set that we’re solving for the software space, but they become more fine tuned when you dig into that Persona type and then making sure that our messaging and our examples and our sandboxing and everything else lands squarely with what their software development lifecycle looks like. So an example here would be also building out these sandbox experiences for them. Like Ross just built a as the Excel pipeline on Flux, where you can just click a button and run stable diffusion, right? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
And you can run that model, you can do whatever you want with it utilizing flux. So instead of requiring the user to go learn and do that on their own, we’re kind of trying to meet them with a more wipe love initialization phase to show them what the capabilities are and kind of bring them towards that golden motion as quickly as possible. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media 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. I know you just had a launch a couple of weeks ago. Talk to us about that launch and the results or the impact I would say so far. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Yeah, definitely. So as I said, Nick’s highly complex. It’s been around for 20 years, so not just like weekend project that you can easily wrap your mind across real quick. We actually launched a beta last year and the main goal of that beta was landing a more exhaustive framework and starting to research and experiment with what solutions for the problems that we’ve set are more meaningful to our target user base. And we hit some really critical milestones with that beta. And that’s where we decided around October last year to go heads down and start working towards this GA. So for us this GA was pretty significant. We launched our first instance of a universal developer environment that can be scaled and used across any os, any metal. When I say any os, I mean specifically Linux. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
But we’re not going too deep on this one, so I’ll leave it at that. And our expectations going in was that we’re going to land this tooling, but we have so much on the roadmap for over the next just two to three months that I think some of us were just like, okay, it’s going to land, some folks are going to take a look at it, give us like a cool thumbs up and user count will continue to grow. And instead I think were met with just the best. I couldn’t even imagine, like that level of reception. I think both the NIcs and non Nicks communities came at this really positively. Our conversion rates are insane, way over our expectations between people landing on our messaging and converting to download and use the product. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
And that I think was just one of the biggest boosts of confidence to a startup team. I think again, someone from the space, there was a bunch of quotes that the team were ecstatic about. But one of the quotes that sat with me recently was someone mentioned that what GitHub did to git locks is doing to nix, right? It’s making it accessible, it’s making it usable, it’s bringing it to the masses. And after you’ve been working for so long to try and achieve that and get that initial verification, even if it’s just from a few individuals on the Internet, it’s a big deal for us on the startup team. 

Brett
If you reflect on the success of the launch, what do you think you got right? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
I think there was three big things we really got right. I think the scope of the product was one. Right. The last thing you want to do, especially in the developer tooling space, is land something that is too wide. We as developers have high opinionation about the flow we use to get our work done. And even if you’re bringing in something that’s much better, I’d prefer it let me test out just a piece of it inside of a piece of my software flow instead of just let me rip out half of it and hope it works. So I think our research team, Jenny and Graham on our product team, did just an immense amount of legwork on the research and experimentation and definition to really scope in what is the exact value we want to land with. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
This time around was like that developer environment. Value mixed with what I found is most critical is the developer experience itself. So it’s like not only how do we make that value occur, but how can we bring it to the developer? How can we just make it seamless for them? It’s like just anything they’ve used up until today, even though it’s utilizing a totally new technology underneath. New in terms of industry awareness, not in terms of being around. The second area is definitely the messaging conciseness. I think a lot of users and a lot of developers heard their voice in the messaging that were able to land, messaging that Ross was able to land. And third, I think it was just general targeting. We didn’t try to target a huge subset of the industry or something like that. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
We went very specific to niche communities, niche languages where we knew that were able to support them not at 100%, but support them at 150% with our product and their needs. And I think that landed really well to date. 

Brett
What do you think has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Robert? I think that the most important go to market decision that we’ve made again to date, just because the launch was just two weeks ago, was really to minimize the amount of scope that we released publicly. 

Brett
Was that hard to do? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
It’s really hard to do, especially when in highly technical product areas, you don’t just have highly technical people across the board, everyone is highly opinionated as well. So it’s like strong belief strongly help. And especially when you as an engineer, right, you’re building the tool for your users who are also engineers. Some way you attach to it more, right? Because in some compartment you’re also building for yourself. So imagine how hard it is to say, you know what, we have all this beauty. That’s ready. That’s like ready to rock and roll and blow people away. But no, no. We’re going to actually put that in an icebox for a few weeks because we want really folks to focus on this user story and we want it to be minimal. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
We want to be understandable and we want to play into the psychology of it to like just land very easily. Rather than giving them like a control panel with 60 buttons that can just do amazing things. It’s like, just give them one button first. So really hard, not easy. 

Brett
What about your market category? Is this something that developers care about? Like, do they think in categories or is that something that’s much more relevant when there’s like an enterprise buying cycle? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
I think that’s a great question. I think it’s much more relevant, definitely to the enterprise because it has a lot of influence on budget and who’s involved and who needs to make that decision and that more big company culture around it. I would say that there’s still relevance in the developer world because also myself as a developer and also building out tools across Facebook and before that, you really want to be able to show where this comes into. Developers have a tool set, developers have a flow, that flow is pretty big, can also slightly alter between the different industries, the different languages that are used. An AI flow would look drastically different than like a front end flow. For instance, someone developing like just a website versus someone developing a language learning model. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
And I think you really want to make sure that when you land, you don’t necessarily have to tell them, oh, I’m coming in at this market sector and this quadrant in the industry, but you’re really precise about this is where we’re coming inside your flow and this is where we’re coming inside your tool set. 

Brett
What about fundraising? So as I mentioned there in the intro, about 28 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
So I think we definitely were fundraising in different points of the macroeconomic climate. Did our first fundraising kind of late 21, and then did our a round in early 23. For me, I think there’s two hats that I can wear and just two aspects that I can look at it, because if we’re talking to other founders, I think one is do what you need to do in order to achieve your goals. And every Founder might have different goals that out of them. It’s like if your goal is to land a product that’s going to be defining in the industry and you’re passionate about making that change, happen for your target user base. It’s like go get the money, go get the resources you need to make it happy. Obviously be calculated about it. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
There’s like way more information that we can share over this podcast meeting for how to go about it. On the flip side, if you’re able to, I would say it’s also immensely critical to try and really bring in the investors and the capital from folks that align with the way that you look at the world. It’ll make the journey easier. But again, I don’t want to blind that with if you need resources and it’s either closing the company or taking that resource, then it’s like go take that resource and do what you need to do. But if you can, especially in more edge areas, for us, it’s like open source PLG free software, right? A huge chunk of our initial IP is out there in the public. That’s insane. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
And my previous company, which wasn’t open source, and that was the first company I ran out of 8200, especially coming out of an intelligence unit, it was like, IP was like the closest thing you kept, right? That was your secret sauce. That was your advantage. So I think I was lucky enough to be able to bring investors that I feel really resonate with some of that thought process thats made every strategical decision and move and discussion and brainstorming feel like a group of very aligned individuals trying to achieve a mutual target rather than potential biases that can waste some time for startups that need to be nimble. 

Brett
If we look at your day to day, whats a typical day look like for you? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
So wake up in the morning. We rescued a dog recently, so usually bakker wakes me up in the morning and we go on a walk at around 07:00 a.m. Our team is fully remote, so by the time I wake up theres already enormous amount of threads. I try not to open slack while Im still in bed trying to open my eyes, but I usually fail at that, just like Im assuming many founders would. Before I even brush my teeth, Im already concerned about 50 things and happy about 20. The whole dog aspect of walking in the morning was just a huge refresh because I think before the dog and we’ve only had him now for just eight, seven months, I think I would be like waking up slack, brush my teeth, morning shake, boom into meetings and just hitting it that way here. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Actually have a good 15 minutes where I walk around, breathe air and try to think about what I actually want to accomplish. Because we’re a remote team, and I’m on the most western side. Usually my day is kind of like friend loaded and a lot of kind of like team syncs. Working with the team across our core priorities and tackling those in kind of synchronous meetings or synchronous channels in the first half of the day. I’m blessed to also work from home and also my wife as well. So usually my wife and I grab lunch in the middle of the day, take Baca for another walk together, and then kind of go back all in for some quieter work session into the later afternoon. 

Brett
What excites you most about that day to day, apart from the dog and the time with the wife? The time with the wife and the dog, what excites you most? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Thank you for stating that for me. So there’s a general thing. I think what we’re trying to do here is a long term shift in how software is done, again without diving too technically deep into it. It’s like software is getting more complex on the day to day. AI is making it even further more complex, whether it’s humans writing the code or AI writing the codes and shipping the environments and shipping the product. And really, I believe, are on the precipice of allowing the general industry to just have a totally new approach to how we’re doing this with totally different sets of principles that solves things at the ground level. We call it flattening the stack of software development. So I think that’s just super empowering and energizing. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
The little Founder thing that I have is a few months ago, I was sitting down with a friend from Docker, which is another company in the space, and I wore my purple flock shirt. And someone at a coffee shop in Palo Alto came up to us and was like, hey, I use Flox. Really wanted to say that you guys are doing great work. And for me that was just like the pinnacle. I was just like that. The chance of that happening again, that’s what I personally, you know, bringing smiles to people’s faces and not even knowing it and then maybe at some point hearing about it offhand is like, I think that’s super energizing. 

Brett
Are the paparazzi following you around now? You go out and walk your dog and you’re just surrounded. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Can’t leave the house because of Baca. Not because of me probably, but yeah, as it is, yeah. But just the genuine. Just to know that the team was building something that is making people’s lives easier or improving whatever they’re doing, or just bringing the smile because of some cool color that we added to. It is fun. 

Brett
Yeah, I imagine that’s awesome. And that makes perfect sense. Now, final question for you, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Definitely. So I think for us it’s like we want to make the fastest and most familiar user experience for developers and small teams and enterprises as much as possible. Right? I think in my mind, as we succeed with the open source and the whole free forever flux Cli, we’re going to start tapping into insights from that larger enterprise origin story and blending in what I believe is a core factor of any developer tooling success, which is again the developer experience for me on the five years. I think along that journey, ideally, again, very ambitiously making any form of development just a much lower bar for creating the environments, jumping into them, whether it’s the latest language models or some open source projects website. From there, I would love Flox. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Since its inception internally, indeed in 2017 has built out a platform that allows us to iterate on top of this amazing open source technology called Nix. I want to open that up. I want to make that an API that other companies, other builders can tap into and build into this ecosystem with those very aggressive principles that are shifting software development and turn this also into a platform. And I think the longest way I can look out into it is if we can bring in these nics based principles into the industry and create that shift. That would be like my 510 year. Im happy about it. I think we’ve been successful moment. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. All right, Ron, were up on time so were going to have to wrap here before we do. If theres any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’m always happy to connect. I’m ron@floxdev.com. I’m super into anything that is related to volunteering, so feel free to also ping me, LinkedIn, email, wherever it is. If I can be helpful. I’m always up for it. 

Brett
Awesome, Ron, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun. 

Ron Efroni Rotman
Likewise. Thank you, Brett. 

Brett
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