The following interview is a conversation we had with Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder of Graphite, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $22.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Code Reviews.
Tomas Reimers
Thanks, Brett. Nice to be here.
Brett
Yeah. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with maybe a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Tomas Reimers
Yeah, sure. So, hi, everyone. My name is Thomas. I’m one of the co-founders here at Graphite. There are three of us total. Before this, I was at Facebook. I was there for three years. I was working on mobile infrastructure there before I chose the leap to go and start a company with two good friends from college. So greg Foster and Merrill Lutsky. Greg and I, we are project partners in every CS class. We actually wrote most code in college together. I think there were two classes we didn’t do or prompt us together. And then Merrill was a few years ahead of us in school. He was more a mentor figure for us, working sort of like venture capital startups. He had left college to go do his YC startup back in summer 2013, came back to school, was a few years ahead of us, and really taught us the reps and startups.
Tomas Reimers
So when those two were like, yeah, we’re going to do a startup and we want you to be a part of it, I knew that was an opportunity I couldn’t miss.
Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. I see you left Facebook. Then in March 2020, some interesting things were happening in the world in March 2020.
Tomas Reimers
I remember very vividly that week, my manager was like, you know, there’s like, some very strange things happening in the world. You sure you all leave the company or not? I’m like, you can’t retain me. I’m going to go start this company. And it’s been a wild ride since then. I remember the original game plan was leave the company, take a few weeks off to go have some vacation, put some space in between ourselves and work with everything happening. We decided to invert and then start fundraising with that. We decided to invert that. And so I left Facebook that weekend. I got a plane to California. Got to San Francisco. That meet March 9, I think. And I just remember that week so vividly because the first, like, two days, every meet was in person. We all say, like, yes, there’s a virus out there, but we cure all our hips and get into this video.
Tomas Reimers
And around Wednesday, everything switched to remote. And it was crazy. All of our meetings were like, hey, can we do zoom instead? And so we ended up spending a lot of that week in this tiny little area we booked, just taking the same meeting over and over again as we talked to VCs that were down the street. That’s hilarious.
Brett
And one other question. Just on your time at Facebook there, what would you say is the number one thing that you walked away with.
Tomas Reimers
When you left Facebook? Oh, so much. I’m eternally grateful to Facebook. Politics of that company aside, I love the work I was doing. I love the people I was working with. I still keep in touch with a lot of them. I think the main thing I left Facebook with was a sense of what a good team and engineering culture looked like, which has been so valuable to draw upon now, where so frequently we’re growing the company pretty quickly. And I know we’ll get to that later on in the show, but for us, I think there’s this constant question of like, oh, you know, like, what would a big company do? And I think Facebook was I was fortunate enough there to be able to get a sense of sort of like, how do teams work? How do we structure them, how do we abstract things out, how do we prioritize things, how do we go?
Tomas Reimers
And being able to walk into a startup with that is such a valuable skill set.
Brett
Yeah, I bet that’s awesome. Now, two other questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a Founder and entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Tomas Reimers
Great question. So I was thinking about this. So CEOs are definitely harder one, mostly because I think that there’s so much that goes into a founding team beyond just the CEO. I’d say the team that we admire the most right now is linear. So if you’ve seen linear app, they do a lot with a little is our take. Their team is somewhat small, but their product is incredible. Their growth strategy has been really successful. They continually hit the mark on execution, and it impresses us every day. Nice.
Brett
I haven’t looked into them too much, but I certainly will after that. What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you? And this can be a business book or a personal book that’s influenced how you view the world.
Tomas Reimers
So many. Fiction or nonfiction? Because I can do both.
Brett
Let’s do one of each.
Tomas Reimers
Great. My favorite book of all time is a book called The Last Days of Night. It’s historical fiction on Edison and Westinghouse and the invention of a light bulb. It’s based in New York, which is near and dear to my heart because I live here. And I think one of the coolest parts about it is you get to the end of the book and the author cites his sources, so he’ll actually tell you, yeah, I know that I said that Tesla and Edison had this fight. I can’t be sure that they had that fight, but here’s a copy of their letters and the citations for them. And so you end up seeing this really incredible novel, which is fictionalized account of how innovation is done. Because what you see is you see, like, Edison and Westinghouse fighting over building the light bulb and how they can get closer and the challenges they run into and how they manage their teams.
Tomas Reimers
And it feels very topical to me even today.
Brett
Nice.
Tomas Reimers
I’ll have to check that out.
Brett
I know a little bit about that story from the documentary The Men Who Built America. Have you watched that?
Tomas Reimers
I haven’t yet.
Brett
Oh, you got to add that to your list. It’s like a five part series. It’s probably like ten years old, but it’s so good and it talks a lot about their battle and how they were fighting it out for basically winning the market. So it’s a good series.
Tomas Reimers
Yes.
Brett
Yeah, I’ll have to check out that book. I’ve not heard of that.
Tomas Reimers
Great. And then nonfiction book, High Up Management, which is probably a fairly common one, would be my guess, but I think it’s the wonderful book by Andy Grove on just sort of like how he saw leading intel. It’s one of those things that I think you’ll see people cite a lot, but it’s actually very helpful when you’re in the weeds to just remember some of it. Nice.
Brett
That’s a really good one. I think I first heard about that in an interview that Brian Chesky did, like, years ago. And it was something about his approach to learning that I think he called just going straight to the source, something along those lines, and he would just pick one book, dedicate to mastering that book, and then that would be what he basically uses. And High Output Management was on there. So I’m like, all right, it’s good enough for Brian Chasky. It’s good enough for me.
Tomas Reimers
I’ll read this book.
Brett
It’s a good one.
Tomas Reimers
It’s a really wonderful book.
Brett
Totally. All right, let’s get into Graphite now. So can you tell us just a bit more about the origin story and then what’s the high level pitch that you’re making to customers?
Tomas Reimers
Absolutely. So Graphite is code review for fast moving teams. The origin story is actually one of those ones that I feel you don’t hear so frequently. So we started actually at a different company entirely, as I told you, worked on mobile, infra at Facebook. I left, I was like, there’s a lot of space to do this out in the world for other startups. And so we started building that. We were fortunate enough to hire some of my old teammates. And I think it was then that were like, you know, facebook had a lot of really good tooling around code review, and we don’t really have that out here. So being, I think, Facebook engineers we are, we started to hack on that as our own internal tooling. And so we built out what started as a CLI, then became a website, then what became a whole platform to try and recreate some of that goodness of code review that we had internally.
Tomas Reimers
It was on summer of 2021 when Fabricator, which is a code review platform, shuts down. And what we saw in a lot of Facebook alumni chats was people being like, yo, Fabricator shutting down. I really don’t want to use GitHub. I don’t think they’re great for code review of closed source projects. What are people doing? And at that time, were working on something else entirely. And we’re like, hey, we have this tooling. Does anyone want it? At the time, we’re thinking maybe we open source it. Maybe we just read a white paper. We don’t know what the right answer is, but let’s see what the interest is. What we ended up with was we ended up with a lot of people at very large companies being like, I absolutely want this, and I’d actually rather that you all host it. We’ve had our fair share of open source or community led projects.
Tomas Reimers
We don’t want to deal with that reality. We want something that just works out of the box because no one has time to deal with this. Can you be that person? And so there’s a pretty bold stance to hear as a company that does something else entirely. We sat on it. We thought about it for a bit. We decided, okay, August, we’ll do an experiment. We’ll take 20 people, we’ll put them onto this platform we have internally. And this was a major lift for us because at this point, it was truly internal pooling. Our repo names were hard coded into it. The coworkers were hard coded into it. All of it was very much sort of like, built for us, not built for others. And so we said, okay, we’ll take 20 of you, and we’ll figure out how to make it work for you.
Tomas Reimers
We ended up with 38 users because we had 38 people write into us and be like, I absolutely need this tool. I have suffered the pain point of having to deal with worse tooling. I know there’s better. You guys are great. Please solve this problem for us. And so we’re like, fine, we’ll have 38 users. We had 38. The number greed is 68. Before our waitlist launch in November, organically, just people would be like, hey, my coworker saw what I had and wants to be on it. And were like, that’s fine. We didn’t really want to upset anyone. And so were like, fine, we’ll add you. We launched our waitlist November 17 of 2021. And what we ended up with, were expecting 500 sign ups. We ended up with 3500. Crazy to us. I remember we had configured our waitlist to like, ping slack whenever we got a sign up.
Tomas Reimers
And that evening, none of us slept because what happened, I remember just the amount of traction we got online was crazy. And what you saw was just a constant. Like, it was awesome. It was like the coolest thing to see. It was just people signing up and very openly, either directly messaging us or DMing us on Twitter or whatever and saying like, hey, this is really cool. I’ve been looking for this. Can I use this product? Let me off the waitlist. And so that was then. Since then, we’ve grown. We’ve built a team around it. We’ve started to offer code review. I’m sure a lot of people here are listening and being like, well, why do you need code review? Isn’t GitHub enough? And my answer to those people is, I think GitHub is actually really wonderful for open source, but I think open source and closed source software development look very different.
Tomas Reimers
If you ask through software engineers what’s the difference between those two, they’ll give you a long list of them. So GitHub is optimized around this open source development and the kind of tool you need. There tends to be more almost subreddit style moderation. It’s like, I want to be able to ban people or mute them or get a sense of who this person is. When you’re in a company, none of those are issues, right? These are people you work with multiple times a day. It’s a very high trust and high context environment. Instead, what you’re looking for is you’re looking for tools to accelerate your development. And when you look at the biggest companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all of them have built their own tooling tier. When you look at the tier of companies below that, say, like Uber, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, they use some of that open source tooling.
Tomas Reimers
And it’s only really when you look at startups that you start to get into GitHub land, at least for code review.
Brett
And zoom in a bit there on the conversation around your launch. So I’m sure every Founder listening would love to have an oversubscribed list of people who want their product when it launches. What did you do to grow that list from nothing to 3500?
Tomas Reimers
Nothing? A hacker news post is the real answer. There’s one hacker news post that got a lot of play. We put some very lightweight energy. So we to this day, I think this company has done two hacker news posts. All of our growth has been organic or word of mouth. I think to us, it’s been a real demonstration of what product market Fit should feel like in the sense of we have users who are very engaged with their product. A joke we make on the team is you don’t need to get it right because our users will tell us when we’re wrong. We mean that sincerely. We have users who have written Chrome extensions to edit our site to be exactly what they want, and then they send us that Chrome extension. They’re like, hey, you guys did it wrong, but it’s good. I fixed it for you.
Tomas Reimers
And you’re like, what is this? We’ve launched features and we have people send in Sharpie on postit notes being like, okay, so I get what you guys are trying to do, but I think the way you should do it is instead this part of the benefit of selling DevTools blessing a curse, honestly, is you get a lot of very in depth feedback. And so it’s very cool to sort of take all that feedback in and then be able to say, like, okay, we think this is the way that software development should happen, or what makes most sense to our users and offer that out.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s something that probably every company has to deal with right when they’re trying to sell tools to developers is developers seem to be very allergic to traditional marketing channels and tactics. So long term, how do you view marketing to developers? Is there a point that you’re going to have to add in some different channels there, outside of just organic? Or what are your views when it comes to just developer marketing in general?
Tomas Reimers
I forgot who told this to me, and it’s become only more true with time, is that developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught. And so when you’re thinking around, quote, selling to developers, what you need to be thinking around is not like selling in the sense of marketing and ads. What you need to be thinking around is education. Almost from the perspective of a college class, the best advice I was given was like, okay, if you want to really get your name out there, what you should do is you should come up with a syllabus for Code Review. Pretend you’re a college professor. You’re teaching Code Review 101. What do you need to teach people? Write that syllabus, write that content, and then start to share that, because that’s how you get traction within the developer community, right? It’s, hey, I’ve created this thing of value.
Tomas Reimers
I want to go ahead and share knowledge. We have share standard, shared data, shared research, share practices, shared thoughts, and then that’s what gets shared.
Brett
I love that it’s such a good mindset to have when you’re approaching developers. Now, you mentioned 3500 there at sign up. Are there any numbers that you can share today to demonstrate how much progress and growth you’ve seen?
Tomas Reimers
To this day, we still have a waitlist. We haven’t let everyone off. We’ve grown our users. So the number I’ll share is from those initial 68. I think we now have about 2000 weekly active users. That’s the number we’re trying to grow. We’ve paused the waitlist for a little bit because what we’re really trying to do is we’re trying to make their experience perfect. I think one of the things that we’ve learned is code review is just such a personal and important part of the workflow that many developers have many different opinions around how it should go. And so that’s what we’re trying to optimize.
Brett
And is there any internal pressure or do you feel pressure just for the need to grow, to not have a waitlist? Like, are you ever tempted to just turn that off and let everyone on that wants to come on?
Tomas Reimers
Definitely tempted. I think one of the things that’s so funny about our product though, is we have so many people chomping up a bit. Every time we make a small post or something, we get a slew of people who are like, yes, I want it, let me on. And so for us, at least at the scale that we’re at, growth is not the major concern. Instead it’s more like education and adoption of okay, pretend someone does sign up. Do they understand our workflow? Do they understand our tool? How do they react to it? Especially because I think what we’ve seen in the early days is that a user who you give the wrong first impression to is really hard to recover. And we still deal with that. We have some users who we let on a little too early and what happens is, fellas, we’ll do interviews with them, we’ll be like, hey, we noticed that you don’t use this feature, it’s broken.
Tomas Reimers
They’re like, yeah, it breaks in this way. We’re like, we fixed that like twelve months ago. You have not even attempted to re engage with the product. And so for us, it’s around fixing that first impression because every lead exposed is one who are either going to capture forever or burn. And so we want to be mindful around sort of that funnel that makes.
Brett
A lot of sense. And in terms of monetization, when do you think that’ll be something that you prioritize and then what will that process look like? So I’m guessing it’s PLG. And then the developers eventually ask their managers or whoever the director is to look into actually buying the product or what does that look like?
Tomas Reimers
PLG for sure. Open question of whether or not it’s sales assisted. I could see a reality where depending on the engagement of the procurement teams, the security teams, compliance teams, whether we do need to make it sales assistant, in either case, what we imagine is we imagine that people start using Graphite, they love it, they decide they want more. And that’s probably the place where we charge the company. We never want to charge the individuals to us. Our viewpoint here is like we solve company problems and we solve individual problems. We want to solve the individual problems for free because they’re frustrating. We built this out of our own game. We want to solve the company problems as well. But we think that’s probably the place where it makes most sense to charge, especially once we’re starting to do work on behalf of companies, it makes sense to start to optimize, like to ask for some form of payment.
Brett
Makes sense. What are your views when it comes to the market category that Graphite is in? Do you view this as just part of that existing code review category or is this a totally new category that you’re going to create or is category creation not really relevant at this stage?
Tomas Reimers
It’s funny, I think we see ourselves as a dev tool. I think the dev tool is like, category is so big in general, we talk around the code review, but I think that code review can be in some ways informative and in some ways confusing. Definitely there are people who are like, oh, code review is one thing and I think code review is one thing. I’ve only ever used GitHub code review because of that. I don’t know what code review can be different. I think for people who have worked, I’m going to say large or medium sized company, they’re like, oh yeah, code review makes sense in the category. There are a lot of tools in that space. And so for us, the category I think at this point is more of a branding and marketing question how do we want to position ourselves? But I think for ourselves and for customers that use us, it’s very clear what we do.
Tomas Reimers
We offer code review, we improve upon the entire experience of creating the entire software development experience, from creating your PR, to reviewing your PR, to merging your PR. And then what we choose to label that I think is a term for later down the line.
Brett
Got it makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned there and I see on your website that it’s for fast moving teams. How do you define a fast moving team and what’s a slow moving team that this product wouldn’t work for or makes sense for them to use?
Tomas Reimers
I think of open source as slow moving. What I mean by that is if you’re an open source maintainer, you get a pull request and the expectations that you review, it maybe within the week, maybe within the month. It’s certainly not within the day and within a company it’s within the hour. And I think that’s how we think around that. Is what’s the velocity that you’re trying to hit? I think that there are some themes for which they’re like actually we don’t mind a slower velocity for whatever reason, right? Perhaps it’s open source, perhaps it’s just not a priority. Whatever. This is the wrong tool for that. That’s not what we’re building. What we’re trying to optimize for are the teams where the developers spend a majority of their day in code review and where what they’re trying to do either like creating things to be reviewed, reviewing other people’s things, or responding to review.
Tomas Reimers
And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to optimize that process so that they can get their code out from like, we like to say, task to trunk of taking that ticket off of their task tracker, implementing it and getting it merged in so that the users see it as fast as possible.
Brett
Interesting. And what about go to market challenges? So I’m sure there’s a long list and we don’t have hours for this interview, but if you had to just choose one of the top challenges or the number one challenge that you faced so far, bringing this to market, what would you say that challenge has been and how do you overcome it?
Tomas Reimers
So many challenges. And I think the fun part about building the startup is that there are always more challenges. So I think one of the more interesting challenges that we had was educating people on our workflow. So one of the things that we do is we offer what we call a stacked changes workflow. What a stacked changes is. Let’s say that for any people in the room who aren’t familiar with the process of code review, there’s this idea that basically I, as a developer, I write some changes, I go ahead, I pass it off to you give me some edits, then it comes back to me. I respond to those. We do this back and forth until eventually I commit those changes or merge them into our code base. One of the challenges there is, let’s say that I just wrote like a comments feature, right?
Tomas Reimers
I give it to you for a review. And now I want to write a reactions feature which is built on the comments feature. Well, I can’t because the comments code doesn’t exist, right? It’s still being reviewed. So I’ve kind of blocked in my work and I have to sit there stacking is this idea of, well, what if you could just write it on top of the comments feature, right? So assume the comments feature will change, but not that much. Implement reactions as if it was just there. And then what you get is you start to build what we call stacks of oh cool, I have one feature, on top of that I have another feature. On top of that I have another feature. And even though you’re waiting on review and people are doing you very thoughtful reviews, they’re not skimping on it because they’re not like, oh, it’s blocking you can start to move ahead.
Tomas Reimers
And so that’s a very cool thing. It exists at Google, at Facebook, a few other companies as well. For other people, it’s around educating them, right? And so if you go to our website and you go to graphic CLI. You’ll see an entire page we’ve dedicated on how to educate people around this workflow. You see stacking, you see the CLI. And so much of what were saying before is the challenge for us is in some part marketing, but more education of just how do we communicate the benefit to people. Both of the problems that you run into when you don’t do this, how you fix this, and going from there.
Brett
Nice.
Tomas Reimers
I love that.
Brett
I love the line educating instead of marketing as well. That’ll be the quote we pull out from the interview. And last couple of questions here for you. What excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Tomas Reimers
The coolest part about it is working with developers day in and day out, both the developers here on this team, we have a team. So our team has grown from at the beginning of last year, were, I want to say five people, and now we’re just under 20, so we’ve grown a lot. And the people here are all awesome. Like, every developer I get to work with every day is like, it’s such a good team, I can’t express it enough. Everyone is so thoughtful around Fed review. Everyone’s really good at what they do, which is very fun, and everyone just wants to hack on it. And then beyond that, the developers we get to work with on the other side, right? The people who use our product are awesome to work with because they’re developers, right? And so unlike other products, where maybe you have to be like, oh, they want it faster.
Tomas Reimers
But we can’t for this technical reason, we are very open of like, listen, here’s the technical challenge we have when working with GitHub or we’re working with some technology. We’re welcome to brainstorm with you on ways to solve this, but this is what we’re facing. And I think one of the success mode for companies that work with us is that they just view us as another team. Like, oh, this is the Code Review team. And the Code Review team is a team at this company like any other team at this company. And they really come to us. It’s like, hey, these are the problems we have. How can we solve them? And we can engage with them on that level. That’s awesome. It’s super cool. It feels collaborative on every level. The analogy I’ve made is that Facebook has one team, I serve many other teams.
Tomas Reimers
Here’s the same deal, right? I’m one team, I serve many other teams. And we just get to like we have regular check in, we have regular readings, we work with them to figure out how we can accomplish our goals. Yeah, it feels very cool.
Brett
That’s amazing. And is everyone based in New York and in the New York office or are you guys remote?
Tomas Reimers
Everyone is. Based in New York. We’re here in the heart of Soho on Spring and Mercer. Everyone’s in person. We are a full in person company that was more contentious, like a year ago. I feel now people have come around to like, okay, we believe that this can exist, and we’re hoping that as time goes on, it continues to just be more normalized.
Brett
Nice. Did you get a lot of pushback a year ago when you went back to the office or had people go back to the office?
Tomas Reimers
It’s funny, we never were remote. So when we started this company, it was three co-founders. We were all friends from college, and so we just decided to bubble together. Right. As I said, march 2020. We didn’t hire anyone until then, the start of 2021, and we had a brief promote stint then until the vaccines came out, at which point the four of us went into office. Then we add another person. Same deal. They came into office. And so we grew this. It was funny. The company grew sort of as COVID as the world became more okay with COVID And so we’ve been in person for quite some time now with candidates. It’s very polarizing. Some people are like, Well, I’m looking for a boat, and that’s fine. This probably isn’t the place for them. And some people are like, honestly, a lot of our teammates here are like, I love that we’re in person.
Tomas Reimers
It’s great that I get to come to an office every day. It’s awesome that I get to know my coworkers. It’s very cool that we have happy hour on Fridays. All of that speaks to a category of person.
Brett
Yeah, for sure. I can see that. All right, final question here for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. Three years from today, what’s the company look like?
Tomas Reimers
So we want to accelerate software like development all the way through. We think Code Review is most interesting to us because I think Code Review is almost this gateway into the rest of the developer platform. But when you look at the biggest companies, the Googles and the Facebook’s, they have entire teams which build developer tooling to accelerate their own developers, starting with Code Review. And we view ourselves as that for everyone else. Right? What we really want to do is we want to bring the speed that these big companies can iterate and develop with and the safety and quality that they get from that too, of more integrated testing, better code coverage, things like that, and provide that to everyone. And so for us, Code Review is just the beginning. It’s a way to start to change the workflow into what we believe to be faster and better and to hopefully take that and see the whole vision through.
Brett
That’s awesome. And that’s super exciting. All right, Tamas, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Tomas Reimers
Best place is Graphite dev we have a blog post right now. We have just started posting regular change log updates, so follow along there. And if anyone is interested in either using Graphite, feel free to shoot me an email at moss at Graphite dev or joining Graphite. We’re also hiring. Awesome.
Brett
Thanks so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building, and share this vision. This is super exciting and we look forward to seeing you execute on this vision and come back in five years when you’ve fully executed on everything you talked about.
Tomas Reimers
Thank you so much, Brett. It’s been wonderful being here.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.