The following interview is a conversation we had with Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $26 Million Raised to Power the Future of WebAssembly

Matt Butcher
It’s great to be here, Brett. 

Brett
Let’s kick off with a bit more about your background and really just how you made your way into being the Founder of Birmingham. 

Matt Butcher
My background started out really weird because when I was in high school, I decided what I really wanted to be was a philosopher. I think I was probably the only person in my graduating class that had aspirations quite like that. But when I got my first job, I was sort of accidentally assigned to a programming team. I was supposed to be assigned to a lawn mowing team, and they confused Matt Butcher with Matt somebody else. And I got put on the wrong team. And nobody caught this mistake for like a couple of months. And so in high school, I started to learn how to do software development. This is right at the rise of the web. And so when I got to college and started studying philosophy, I needed to pay the tuition somehow. 

Matt Butcher
And side jobs in philosophy are few and far between, if there even are any. So I started writing code and building websites and all the stuff were all doing in the late 90s, early 2000s, in order to pay the bills, I went all the way through a PhD in philosophy. And the entire time my assumption was I was going to finish my phd, become a philosophy professor, spend my years toiling in the ivory tower and so on. But all along the way, in order to pay the bills, I kept doing more and more software development. I got into content management systems, really. I got into drupal big time and was doing a whole lot of PHP. And then I hit that kind of crucial moment where you graduate and you’re like, oh, now I actually have to make a big life choice here. 

Matt Butcher
And so I taught for a little while, but teaching gigs, university teaching gigs are also a hard career to get into. And so I was doing part time teaching and still paying the bills by doing development. And the more I got into the teaching part, the more I thought, man, university life, it just moves at a glacial pace, right? I mean, university is about innovation. Philosophy really, at its core is about innovation, but the expectation is that a single innovation may take your entire career. Right? And I’m going like, when I compare that to sort of like the way I like to work and the kind of move fast break things kind of mentality, I think I like programming better than I like philosophy. 

Matt Butcher
So, still paying off the college debt here many years later, but I actually kind of pivoted, ended up moving from content because I was doing content management system work. I ended up joining this brand new group at HP that was called HP Cloud. And this is back in 2000, and I don’t know, ten ish probably. I don’t remember when they got started up, but they were, like, beginning to build a cloud offering to compete with this kind of upstart bookstore that had started leasing out their cloud services. And they’re like, we should be the ones to really bring cloud to the forefront. So I was just completely absorbed with the passion there. We were doing some really interesting stuff. 

Matt Butcher
I was supposed to be building the developer websites, but the more I got into this cloud computing thing and Openstack and the whole set of technologies and paradigms that I thought were really kind of changing the industry, I got so sucked in. I went to my boss and I’m like, I don’t want to do the content management thing anymore. I know I told you that was like my life job, but now I want to go do this cloud stuff. And he moved me over. And by the end of my time at HP, I was running the platform as a service team there, building basically a competitor to, you know, kind of what happened at, you know, this is an awesome business unit. The vice president that ran this unit was fantastic. At some point he left. 

Matt Butcher
And for me, I didn’t even realize until that very moment how much of my passion was really derivative passion from this vp, right? He was so good at getting us amped up. Our all hands meetings were phenomenal. And after he left and I kind of lost the vision along with it, I ended up kind of going through a bout of doubt and maybe kind of low key depression. And my wife said, you need to get out and try something different. You’re in a funk. And so she actually helped me find a job. I was living in Chicago at the time. She sent me a job posting for a job in Boulder, Colorado, for IoT. And I’m like, well, that’s definitely the opposite spectrum of public cloud or the opposite side of the spectrum from public cloud. 

Matt Butcher
So I, you know, interviewed there, ended up joining Revolve, which was a startup company here, worked for a CEO named Tim Enwall, who was a phenomenal CEO and had this kind of mentorship attitude toward really everybody in the company. I mean, it was remarkable. I’ve never had never met a CEO who would mentor anybody in the company. And so we took a couple of walks. Even after I had moved on from that kind of thing, years later, still would reach out to him. He’ll come back into the story in a minute. But revolve got acquired by Google. We got rolled into Nest. I was doing a lot of the cloud side of revolve, so I didn’t actually ever get that far away from cloud and then got to see inside of Google, sort of the great monolith that was the entire Borg world. 

Matt Butcher
And they were kind of early pioneers in what is now the container ecosystem. But around the same time I was there, the docker had kind of come out with its new container ecosystem stuff and was challenging the kind of virtual, machine oriented cloud that I had been building at HP. And I got really interested in that enough so that it sort of pried me out of Google. And I went and joined another startup in Boulder called Deus. And Deus was building a platform as a service on top of container technologies. And so I sort of jumped in there and went, hey, this is all the stuff I loved about HP. I’m really comfortable in the PaaS space, but now we’re doing it on a new and exciting technology. 

Matt Butcher
And, I don’t know, maybe six months or so into that job, Google released this big giant container operations platform called Kubernetes. And, I mean, this is like, at the point at which kubernetes was toothpicks and marshmallows, right? It was 1.01.1, very early in this thing that has now really shaped the landscape. But when I saw it, I was like, oh, this is really cool. And the CTO at Deus and I sat down and talked about it and agreed that I could break off kind of the main pass project, have a couple of people, we do a little bit of r and D work on this Kubernetes stuff and see if it was going to stick. Our conclusion was, yeah, this is a great technology. We should just replatform our entire Paas offering on top of kubernetes. 

Matt Butcher
Out of this, we started building a package manager for Kubernetes called Helm, which is now in use by about 70% of the Kubernetes using population. We wrote this silly marketing guide called the Illustrated Children’s guide to Kubernetes. Karen Chu and I wrote this and it kind of took off and gained a life of its own and is now an official. The characters are now the official mascots of the know. All these funny things that happened basically as just sort of like offshoots of what my day job was supposed to be. And then along came Microsoft and said, hey, y’all are doing some really amazing stuff in the Kubernetes space. We’d like to acquire you. And we had this. So Microsoft acquired know. As you can tell, I’ve been through a few acquisitions at this point in my career and that one was phenomenal. 

Matt Butcher
I’ve never gone through an acquisition like that. The attrition rate was nearly zero. We split into two teams. One team went off and built aks, which is now the fastest growing azure service inside of Microsoft. My team became like the open source upstream team and our mandate was excellent. It was like, hey, go out there and build new things in this brand new ecosystem and show people the power of containers and the potential of Kubernetes and how all these things can work together and what tomorrow’s workloads are going to look like. This is like 2016, 2017 when we got started doing this and it was phenomenal, right? We went to all the open source conferences, we got to visit with different service teams inside of Microsoft and kind of ask them what their big struggles were, what can Kubernetes do for you? 

Matt Butcher
That kind of thing. And then we got to kind of meet with customers or potential customers or people in Microsoft startup program and kind of find out what they were doing and what they were building. And then as a result of this, we would build tooling to help do this kind of stuff in the Kubernetes ecosystem. And all of our tooling got released as open source software under this name, Deus Labs. So Deus, we really got to keep the name from Deus even on into our Microsoft days. So it was a really fantastic, just, I tell everybody, and I mean this genuinely and sincerely, I had the best job in all of Microsoft. I got to run this really cool open source team that was engaged with the community, engaged with customers, and always kind of being pushed to push the cutting edge. 

Matt Butcher
Right, exactly the kind of thing that was the antithesis of that whole philosophy thing where it was like I might get to do one innovation in my life. Here I am every day on this team of highly innovative people challenging the status quo day by day. So it’s just a lot of fun along the way. We found a lot of problems that we could solve and a lot of things that we could contribute, but we got to a couple of sticking points, and these sticking points were developers wanted to be able to build their code once and have it run on lots of different architectures, but the container ecosystem wasn’t quite set up that way. Developers would often have to build their code or compile and package their code once per operating system architecture combo. 

Matt Butcher
And that meant the developers had to really be in the know about everything that happened on the operational side of the house with the platform engineers. And that always kind of introduced a little friction because there’s a lot of tossing things over the wall and having them. This doesn’t work here, I can’t give you access to production. Let me tell you what happened. And that became kind of a prime target for us where we said the friction between development teams and operations teams have only been sort of exacerbated by the rise of kubernetes and by the rise of contemporary cloud, because now everything was sort of API driven and there was a lot of a push for developers to sort of be self service oriented. 

Matt Butcher
However, that meant that they had to know a whole lot about the operational world and they were extra sensitive to changes in the operational world and they were frustrated about that. We heard over and over again developers telling us, this is frustrating for us. Flip the coin to the other side and ask the platform engineers, how do you feel about this world? And they’re like, finally we have an infrastructure service that’s declarative, where we can just describe what we want and deploy it. We like that world. It’s so much better than logging into command lines and running a whole bunch of commands. 

Matt Butcher
On the flip side, the developers are really frustrating because anytime something breaks in production, we have to push it back over to the developers to fix because everything is so tied into the infrastructure and consequently they get grouchy because we’re asking them to interrupt their workflow to fix a bug. So we started to see the sort of like bifurcation and the friction that it was causing and said, okay, well, what’s at the root of this? And started looking into the various technological problems that sat underneath this problem. And that led us to some surprising conclusions, one of which was just that the developers were liking this kind of newly emerging pattern called serverless functions and serverless applications. 

Matt Butcher
But the platform that existed for that really was like Amazon Lambda or Azure functions or Google Cloud functions, ones where the platform engineers had very little control over it and were kind of frustrated by the way it operated and its performance and things like that. So we started investigating technologies that might be able to kind of fill this gap. Can we come up with a technology that’ll be kind of a next wave of cloud computing that’ll enable a better way of running serverless functions? And that ultimately is what led us to start Fermyon. We started saying, this is a problem we really want to tackle. We really want to focus on. It’s outside of the mandate of what my team was supposed to be doing at Microsoft. 

Matt Butcher
So on the same day in October of 2021, ten of us left Microsoft and then a few weeks later started Fermyon and have been kind of going strong ever since, building this next wave of cloud computing. 

Brett
Was that hard to leave Microsoft? You had described it as kind of a dream job and a dream position to be in. Was it hard to make that leap? 

Matt Butcher
Oh my gosh, it was very hard. And I was reading, oh, I wish I could remember the book. I was reading a book about leadership and management the other day and actually got me kind of choked up while I was reading this because it took until I read that to realize sort of how hard the transition was and what a huge leap of faith the other nine people make, right? It was like, here I’m in a great job, great pay, stock is like shooting up, and I like the team and I like the stuff I’m doing. And I got this inkling that there’s something else out there that we could know. Just an inkling, maybe we could do this right. Let’s make a big gamble on Matt’s intuition of something. And the team had all worked together. We were very close. 

Matt Butcher
But I hadn’t realized till reading that book made a point, sort of in passing something like the difference between a manager and a leader or something to this effect, was that a leader’s gravity is so strong that when they move on to something else, people follow. And that was kind of the statement there. And when I read that and realized for the first time, and I admit it’s kind of embarrassing to realize this, but for the first time, I realized I had asked nine people to leave a stable job on doing stuff that they loved and in an environment where they could be very productive and very happy and potentially ride out their entire career. I had asked them and all of them came along and all of us jumped into something new and scary and full of uncertainty. 

Matt Butcher
And I guess I’m kind of glad I didn’t realize before that I had asked people to make a big wager on this. But it’s so exciting that they did, because when you bring ten people into a startup at once, ten people who have worked together for years, the typical kind of startup formation goes, what’s the group development thing? Form, storm, norm, conform. Right? You all form up, and everything’s going great for about three months, and then everybody hits this conflict storming phase. We had passed through that years ago, so were already all the way at the end of that group development dynamic and operating with from day one. From day one, we launched the vision of Roadmap and an immediate project that were going to start working on that day. And you just can’t do that when you haven’t worked together with people. 

Matt Butcher
And so even looking back, I got choked up thinking we collectively made a big gamble. By all measures, it appears to be paying off well for us now, right? We’re in this really happy place. But that one thing of coming together as a team made, I think, a world of difference as far as getting started. 

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 podcast. Now back today’s episode. And what did those team members see, do you think? What did they see in the vision, and what did they see in your leadership to say, all right, let’s leave this world behind and this idea. What do you think they were seeing? 

Matt Butcher
Covid changed things for a lot of people. Right? And one of the things that know Covid, the lockdown and everything happened while were at Microsoft. And so this is the same team. We’re all working together at Microsoft during COVID and we hit this point that was just collective, right? We’re all kind of just feeling low. And I think there are a number of ways that experience could have played out, right? It could certainly play out that we all just quiet quit and sat around and commiserated and things like that. And I will tell you, for me, that was the number one temptation. I was in a very emotionally low place during that time. But what ended up happening was we started talking about, well, what kinds of things could get us excited, even in this kind of low time. 

Matt Butcher
And this notion of maybe there’s kind of another kind of cloud that we could build out there kind of got us a little bit galvanized. We kind of reworked our entire work schedule to be based around stand ups, went from, what did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? To how are you feeling today? What would make your day better? Questions like that. Projects went from grinding through bug releases and fixes and things like that to what’s getting you excited? Let’s spend most of the day on that and then check off the mandatory checkboxes as we go. We knew our momentum would slow down. We knew the velocity wouldn’t be nearly as high as it was before. 

Matt Butcher
But we knew that if we wanted to stick together as a team and still be productive in any degree, that was kind of going to have to be the way we did it. But in hindsight, I think that was the experience, the sort of galvanizing experience for us as a team, that it amplifies trust. And in particular, when you can trust somebody to say, look, I know that we got a to do list as long as my arm, but we’re going to do what’s right for people’s mental health, and we’re also going to do it in a way that gets us amped up about the job that we are doing right. And I think that made a huge difference. 

Matt Butcher
So, in a strange sort of way, I think the answer to your question is the galvanizing moment of COVID is really what built confidence in ourselves and in the team. I think, you know, was the kind of thing that when the team heard me say, heard Radu and I, Ratu, the CTO and the visionary behind all of this, when they heard us say, we have the potential to start something new at something big, they knew that in addition to doing something new and exciting, we would do it following those same kinds of practices and paradigms that we developed during what was the worst of times. 

Brett
And if you reflect on this journey so far, if you were starting the company again from scratch, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself? 

Matt Butcher
There are so many pieces of advice that I wish I had. In a way, the thing that I look back on and that I wish that I had known was that to sit in this particular seat, right, compared to being a manager or a leader inside of an organization, to sit in the CEO seat requires you to be fearless and requires you to be bold in ways that you weren’t before. So I will give you an example, and this is a trivial example, but something I really struggled with. Reaching out to the first potential customers was terrifying to me. I’m like, I’ve been in the industry for 20 some years, but the idea of being the first contact, to reach out to the first customer and say, we have a product that we think you would like. 

Matt Butcher
Can you jump on a call for 30 minutes? I was so terrified. And then somebody gave me this pep talk. This is part of your job and it’s 30 minutes of your life and you’re going to make a mistake. And this customer is probably not going to close a million dollar deal with you. This is your practice run, right? But you’re in the pilot’s chair now, so go do this. And actually, I think it was Tim Enwall who was actually the CEO of Revolve and is now the CEO of Fermyon. But at the time he was consulting with us and I think it was him that sort of set down that advice. And I did and I showed up and it was horrible and I did a really bad job and we didn’t close a contract. But I came out of that. 

Matt Butcher
I mean, I survived. I can do this. And over time, that was the kind of pattern of boldness that I realized as the CEO, you have to pick up. You have to admit the fact that you don’t know a whole bunch of this stuff you’re going to learn on the job. But by leaning into it and saying, all right, I’m going to fall flat on my face the first time, the second time, I’m just going to trip a little bit. Maybe the third time I’ll be able to stand up on my own 2ft. And then after that it’ll start to become a pattern. That happened with sales, happened with finance, happened with hiring, happened with all of these things, one after another. And I should call back and put Tim Anwall in his rightful place in this story. 

Matt Butcher
So Tim Anwall is the CEO of Revolve. Very the first CEO that had ever taken the time to sit down with me and say, this is what a company looks like, this is how it runs. I think he’s ceoed probably five different companies at this point. And so before ad even started Fermyon, when it was still an early idea in my mind, I asked him out for coffee and said, hey, would you be interested in being the CEO of this new company? I’m kind of thinking about this new company, and I think you’d be a great CEO for it. Roddy would be the know, just kind of laying this whole thing out for him. And he says, I think you’d be a good. And I said, no, I would not. I most definitely would not. 

Matt Butcher
And he spent about an hour in this coffee shop. I had so much coffee that I was literally vibrating by the time I left the coffee shop. But he spent. Spent the whole time going, this is what you need to know. This is how you do it. Here’s a list of books to read. Here’s my personal phone number, my personal email, so you can email me or call me whenever. These are the first things you need to do next week to kind of figure out if this is right for you. And I believe, and that was kind of it. So I took it at heart, ended up calling some vcs, having some great conversations that led to our first round of funding. Sat down with Radu. We talked about what we needed to do together to get things. I just. 

Brett
It’s. 

Matt Butcher
It sort of ignited my passion at that point. So when we started the company, and Tim was still the CEO of robotics company at the time, Misty Robotics. Which of they were going through, I didn’t know at the time, but they were going through an entire acquisition process. So he ended up having some spare hours, and then as he was ramping down there, and so I asked him if he’d come in and just kind of do some consulting work for us. And ultimately, over time, the team just started clicking so well together that I asked him, hey, would you consider just kind of coming in? I mean, you’ve been amazing. He’s such a good tactician and such a good strategist, that to have somebody, and particularly when it comes to finance in some of the areas where I’m absolutely the weakest. 

Matt Butcher
And when he agreed to come in as the full time coo, it’s one of those where you’re on the call and you’re smiling and you hang up the call and you’re like, yes. Dancing around the room, kind of fist pumping in the air. And then you join the next call and you’re trying to look calm and collected. Oh, hi. How are you today? But it was just great. And we have since then formed this very strong leadership team, and it has just been. Just been fantastic. Again, anytime you introduce somebody new into that phase, you worry, am I just kicking us back into the form and storm part of that whole group development pipeline? 

Matt Butcher
But having the background with him and all of that, I would say, the one thing that continues to impress me about him over and over again, and I hope that this becomes part of my character over time, too, is his ability to put on the mentor hat when I ask him to and say, tim, I’m really stuck on this. I don’t know what to do about this case. And then immediately take it back off again and say, I’m the COO and you’re the CEO, and I don’t want to push you to make a decision you don’t want to. That’s all in your hands. The amount of humility it takes for a five time CEO to simultaneously be a COO and a mentor to a new CEO has just boggled my mind. 

Matt Butcher
And it’s a character trait that I see in him every day that I hope I learn to emulate, because I just think it’s profoundly impactful for us at Fermyon, and I hope to be that kind of person for somebody else someday. 

Brett
Now let’s switch gears a little bit and let’s talk about growth. So our audience loves to hear numbers and metrics. Are there any numbers you can share. 

Matt Butcher
That just highlight some of the traction. 

Brett
You’Re seeing in the market? 

Matt Butcher
Three was a good number. 2700 was a good number. No. One of the interesting things about Fermyon is we’re kind of trying to simultaneously sort of pioneer this kind of new wave and also begin to build something that is very practical and very useful for developers. And so we launched our first open source project on March 30 of 2022. And I remember the day very specifically because the mandate was we are not launching on April Fool’s Day, so we got to launch before April Fool’s Day. So we launched the last opportunity before April Fool’s Day. 

Matt Butcher
And we left on a Friday, having just launched our open source thing and our first blog post announcing our new open source thing, and came back on Monday to discover that over the weekend we had trended way up on hacker News and we had thousands and thousands of page views on our website, thousands of downloads of spin, all these really positive comments on hacker News. And that was the moment when went, okay, the first. What would that have been around six months? We’re kind of stealth mode, right? And in stealth mode every day, you can get yourself pumped up by saying, we’re going to build something cool, and when we put it out there, people are going to love it. And you can get discouraged by saying, we have no idea if anybody’s going to pay any attention to us when they finally launch. 

Matt Butcher
But that moment, that was a formative instant in our time, right? Monday morning there was an instant where we all went, oh wait, people like this. At least some people like this. And the hacker news comments are actually nice. This is great. That first one was really good. It kind of sets the bar high when you immediately kind of shoot out of the gate like that. And then every other time you start to trend up in news, you’re like, yeah, but it didn’t do as well as that first time. But it had been great. So we did that. Then in October of last year, we launched our first hosted cloud product. And this is the core of our go to market strategy. 

Matt Butcher
We built a developer oriented tool to woo the developers that we know would be really excited about this kind of new wave of serverless computing. And then we built a hosting environment that hosts where you can execute these kinds of serverless workloads. We made an open source reference implementation that if you want to spend several hours configuring and tuning, you can kind of set up your own version of it. And then we provided a hosted version, which we launched in October of last year. And the goal with the hosted version was that we could message this as, hey, developers, this is the easiest way for you to go from, and our kind of core user story, the easiest way for you to go from a blinking cursor to a deployed application in two minutes or less. 

Matt Butcher
And so we had all these metrics around us. We’ve got to make sure that the developer can literally get from a blinking cursor to the point where they’re deploying the application in about a minute and 30 seconds, minute and 40 seconds, so that they have 20 seconds to kind of the deployment to actually happen. And over and over, I mean, we shaped our product roadmap for the entire year of 2022 around the one core user story. As a developer, I can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less. Every single person in the company knows that line, has it memorized because it was just, we drilled it in. This is the story we want to be able to tell. And so that deployment hosted platform had to fit well into that story. 

Matt Butcher
So when we launched it in October, we launched this cloud that ran developer light, kind of light developer workloads, really oriented around finishing off the developer experience story. In other words, the non fancy way of saying this is we did not build a production cloud to launch in October. We built a developer oriented cloud to launch in October, knowing that then after that we would begin building up the second phase of our strategy, which was how do we create, how do we make Fermyon cloud the best place to run your serverless applications? And that’s been our kind of big user story for 2023. And we kind of followed the classic PLG style of model. We wanted to introduce a free tier, continue to add functions onto that free tier. 

Matt Butcher
About a week and a half ago, we launched our first paid tier, which is really oriented toward kind of the expert individual that bumps your limits way up, allows you to run 100 different applications on Fermyon at millions of requests per month. And then we’ve begun kind of eking away at the additional kind of speed bumps we find in the developer deployment kind of story. How do we make it easier for a developer to work with a NoSQL database? How do we make it easier for them to work with domain mapping? How do we make it easier for them to work with a real SQL database? And so on. Right? And so ultimately on that side, in the classic kind of PLG playbook, you want to introduce a three tier or a trial run. 

Matt Butcher
We chose the three tier route and we chose to make it very generous with the goal of being anybody should be able to run their website and a couple of other applications at a production grade quality in Fermyon cloud. Then the paid tier introduces the more professional aspect. Right. You can run lots and lots of applications here. You get much higher bandwidth and much higher processor and memory allocations and so on. But then the flip side of this is at this point went very rapidly from zero users to, I think within our first month we got 100 users. And were like, wow, this is amazing. We have 100 users, right? Every time we saw a sign up thing pop up in slack, it was like, yeah, another user. And then now we’re up in the thousands and still growing. 

Matt Butcher
And it’s been really exciting to just kind of see the momentum build a little bit. We haven’t hit sort of that Founder’s dream, right, the hockey stick moment where you’re like, yeah, there’s no way to map a straight line to this growth curve anymore, right. This is definitely pulling up into the right. But we’re seeing those early indications happening now where the points are gradually pulling up faster than they had in the past. Growth is accelerating, and that’s been really exciting. So we’re going to continue rolling out a lot of features that are designed for that PLG method of growing by adding new databases, new backend storage things, new integrations with existing services, and then the next piece after that is really, well, the real value proposition of serverless, right? There’s a developer user experience story, all of that kind of thing. 

Matt Butcher
There’s a performance boon there. But the real value of serverless long term is that it can cut cost at a very. And the higher you scale, right. The more applications you have, the more cost it’s going to cut. So the enterprise story for us is very powerful. You can have your developers writing less code, you can have them iterating much faster, and you can make a huge 20, 30% byte out of the cost of operations of these services as you go. And so that’s kind of the playbook that as we look forward now to late 2023, but really early 2024, we say, okay, that’s the next core story we’re going to focus once we’ve got sort of this PLG red map laid out. 

Brett
And final question, Matt, before we wrap up, we’re almost over on time here. Can you paint a picture for us for the vision? Let’s maybe zoom out three to five years from what is this vision that you’re trying to build? 

Matt Butcher
Yeah. The big vision for Fermyon, even from the very beginning, has been we want to build the next wave of cloud computing, a way that developers can be more productive, platform engineering can be more productive. The two of them can have a better relationship working with each other, ultimately. What does that mean though? What would it look like if all of this came to fruition? Well, because of the core technologies we’re building on, it means that we have these profoundly, highly scalable applications that can distribute not just in a data center, but often to the on prem equipment, things like that help solve some of these cost fluctuation problems between cloud and on Prem, and bare metal versus cloud. 

Matt Butcher
And so the five year story for us, what would just have us absolutely elated is if we had taken a group of developers that were just sort of raving fans of this and built from that, the foundation for, and the realization of this sort of highly efficient cloud that was driving cost down instead of up, that was driving maintenance down instead of up, and it was still pleasing the platform engineers by checking all of those checkboxes. I think that’s our long term vision. And we feel like serverless applications are really kind of at the foundation of that. 

Matt Butcher
And yesterday’s method of developing by long running servers that run for days, months, quarters, years, that kind of thing will be replaced by these sort of like instantly available, instantly scalable serverless functions that run in milliseconds where their lifetime is milliseconds instead of days, months, years, and consequently the cost of compute just drives down and down. The exciting thing for me is that with AI hitting its stride, suddenly with the rise of Chat GPT, this story is a foundational infrastructure piece of what I think the longer term AI eats everything kind of story will end up being because we will provide the kind of high performance, low cost, extraordinarily developer friendly environment upon which that generation of applications is built. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and I love your energy. It’s always so fun speaking with founders and leaders who are just super excited about what they’re building. And I think myself and everyone listening in, they can feel your energy and they can feel that excitement. So, Matt, this has been so much fun. I’ve really enjoyed conversation and really appreciate. 

Matt Butcher
You taking the time to sure. Thanks for having me. This is a blast. 

Brett
And if founders listening in want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

Matt Butcher
Best place is fermyon.com. We have a blog that’s very active and it covers kind of everything from what conferences we’re going to what the core vision is behind this to the technical details of how we’ve done what we’ve done. 

Brett
Amazing. Matt, thanks so much. 

Matt Butcher
Really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, take care. 

Brett
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