The following interview is a conversation we had with Marcin Wyszynski, Co-Founder and CPO of Spacelift, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $22 Million Raised to Build the Future of IaC Management

Marcin Wyszyński
Thanks for having me, Brett. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we can talk about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Marcin Wyszyński
Sure. So, as you pointed out correctly, I’m a Chief product officer at Spacelift. My background is in statistics and software engineering. I’ve been with Google for seven years. That was the first real job my career. Then joined Facebook, then spent two years as a CTO of a static cloud analysis startup. And after that I spent a couple of years being a consultant for digital transformation, cloud migration and essentially helped scale up their processes with regards to DevOps. For the last three years I’ve been working on Spaceship, first as a CEO and then as a chief product officer, which I’m currently doing. 

Brett
And you’re based in Poland today. When you were working for Google and for Facebook, where was that? Was that in Poland? 

Marcin Wyszyński
No, so that was in Dublin and Ireland. 

Brett
Got it. Very interesting. And tell us about Poland right now in terms of the tech ecosystem and what that startup landscape looks like. Is there a lot of activity there today? 

Marcin Wyszyński
There is definitely way more activity than there used to be. When I moved back to Poland in 2015 and started the startup, back then it was static coach analysis. It was even difficult to find a VC that would meet us. It was extremely difficult to get mentorship. It would be hard to even people wouldn’t even know how to do this whole startup thing. There was some government money being put in, some EU funds being funneled into scaling up the ecosystem. But it was very much in its infancy and we ended up not raising anything because the terms were so bad that it would be easier to do like angel investment round than to try to go after real VCs. And back then, people didn’t really established VCs wouldn’t even look at Poland as a source of good ideas or good companies. Things have changed since then. 

Marcin Wyszyński
Now, especially after the Pandemic, when it doesn’t make that much difference where we are physically because people aren’t really meeting in person. The world is a little bit more flat. So being in Poland is not that much of a stopper when it comes to funding, when it comes to good introductions. So things have changed big time for the last seven, eight years. 

Brett
And does Poland have a big unicorn, or is there like a big startup there that everyone kind of looks up to and admires? 

Marcin Wyszyński
There wouldn’t be a single startup that everyone admires. But the first unicorn to come out of Poland is a company called Dark Planner, which is a platform for managing. First of all, it started as a review site for doctors, and now it’s also like, a management platform for all things medical. And they’re probably market leader in most European countries and some Latin America. So it’s a big, important startup coming from Poland. We have a number of shining stars coming from Poland in one way or another. Like oxy, for example. Brand 24 would be a Polish company. We have companies like Zawi, which is a more recent startup from I’d call it our badge because they were funded roughly at the same time as were, and they’re following a similar trajectory. But when it comes to household names, not that many, unfortunately. Not yet. 

Brett
Spacelift in two to three years, right? 

Marcin Wyszyński
Yes, hopefully. Although Spacelift is a, B2B, SaaS, so it’s not that recognizable a name book. C would be a consumer tech company. So you have a chance to see the mind. Share is larger, obviously, than companies like datadoc is super successful. GitHub is super successful. But if you look, if you ask a person on the street whether they ever interacted with GitHub or Datadoc, they just go like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So there’s like, a difference between being successful in business and being recognizable. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now let’s dive a little bit deeper into who you are. So two questions that we like to ask to do. So first one is, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

Marcin Wyszyński
The CEO I admire the most is no longer a CEO. And it might be a little bit controversial because we are in some form, a competitor to his current company, but it’s Mitchell Hashimoto from HashiCorp. What I admire about him is that, well, he follows very similar trajectory to myself being like an accidental Founder. I’m an accidental Founder myself. I wasn’t ever thinking about starting a company. Like, I’m a geek, I’m a nerd, I’m a creator, a tinkerer, an experimenter. But I’m not an entrepreneur by heart. I just want to build cool things. And it seems, based on history, mitchell is the same, but never mitchell never had the honor. He started a company as an accidental Founder. He was extremely successful with his Co-Founder, and it looks like the more he got into, the bigger the company got. He actually stayed true to his principles, to being a tinker, you can see, is like, he was a CEO like a unicorn when he was submitting pull requests to open source projects. 

Marcin Wyszyński
Right. He was starting those projects himself when he realized that being a CEO is not what he wanted or that he wasn’t best suited to the role of CEO, that there were better people to do it and the company could be more successful, he could be happier. He would switch from CEO to CTO, and then he would switch to an individual contributor eventually, which came as a shock to a lot of people. But when I looked at I read the announcement, I think it was last year, I was like, yeah, makes perfect sense, right? This is how he contributes best to his company. It’s absolutely perfect. But it’s very unusual. Usually people let their ego decide on their career moves, but it looks like with Mitchell, it’s his heart deciding, and it’s his judgment of where he brings the most value, which I admire a lot. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. Now, what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be a business book or just a personal book that influenced how you view the world. 

Marcin Wyszyński
So in terms of business books, I don’t read business books very frequently because usually you read the COVID and then the rest is more of the same. So it’s like a book you get at the airport, and, okay, you read the COVID you buy a book, you get on a plane, and you’re hoping to find something more than there was on the COVID But it’s actually like hammering the same points over and over again. And occasionally you find another book from the same author that claims the exact opposite. So I have a little bit of a problem with those books, but if I may recommend one book about product in particular that would be inspired by Marty Kagan. So I’m a big fan of Svpgs work in general. It’s not rocket science what they do, but they essentially put a lot of methodology around intuitions, right. 

Marcin Wyszyński
As a product person or as a Founder, you get a lot of intuitions as you grow the company and as you become larger. And if I knew their work before, I think I would have been more successful, and maybe we would have grown the company a little bit faster. Maybe we would have avoided some mistakes. So if there’s one book that you want to read, getting into product, I would suggest Inspired as one book. They also have two more books from that body of work. I read empowered. I recently bought a third book that they launched Thing, last year, but I haven’t had a chance to read it. It’s more about product marketing rather than building the product, but I’m very much looking forward to having some time to read it, I suppose. 

Brett
Nice. I’ll have to check those out. Now let’s dive deeper into the company. So can we just start with the origin story behind spacelift? 

Marcin Wyszyński
Sure. So as I said, I’ve been with Google for a couple of years building various things really, but I’ve been on the back end essentially building storage systems. And I was an SRE, so know, my job was to keep the things running and to build the tooling around products. But it was really know, SRE might be called DevOps before there was DevOps. Right. And I built a lot of internal tooling both at Google and at Facebook, and that was my thing, pretty much. I was the go to person to build devtooling. So when I then switched to consulting, that was my primary focus as well. My focus was to give scale ups and companies that didn’t have the time to build all of that stuff that Google and Facebook accumulated over the years. Tried to get things off the shelf, try to buy things, but eventually try to offer the same experience for developers that would set them up for success in terms of growth and maintenance of the velocity that they had essentially built them. 

Marcin Wyszyński
DevOps pipelines, delivery pipelines, observability pipelines, et cetera. As part of that, I built a number of bespoke solutions. Now obviously, I am a builder, I do like tinkering, but as a consultant, you don’t necessarily build that much. So you try to first get something for free. They’re paying you a day rate. Why should they be paying extra for software if they don’t need to pay for software? Maybe they’ll pay you a better day rate. So you try to get things for free, but if you can’t, you probably want to buy. Building is the last resort. If there’s nothing you can get for free, there’s nothing you can buy, then you’ll try to build. And I built a number of things for my clients. One of those things turned out to be more successful than others. The way I saw it was when people were moving companies, they would come to me and say, Martin, I know you built a number of things at my previous employer, there’s one thing that I really need in my new place. 

Marcin Wyszyński
And they said what it was. It was essentially a predecessor of spacelift, and no other thing that I built came anywhere close to that sort of success. And I thought to myself, I might not be an entrepreneur by heart, but if I don’t give it a chance, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life. So, well, I took my savings, I invested in building a park, and then took it to market and tried to find a business Co-Founder that will help me to turn into a business. And three years later, here we are. 

Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. So did you always know that you were going to eventually transition out from being CEO to focus on the product? 

Marcin Wyszyński
So while were still in our infancy. The plan was to have like, a technical CEO. It was just better messaging for the investors. It was better messaging. At least we felt that way. It was better messaging for the developers that were approaching as the early adopters that a CEO is an engineer and is a hands on practitioner. As we grew the company, it became quite clear that the focus of a CEO right now is business and not getting product off the ground. At that point, I had the luxury of resigning. 

Brett
This post makes a lot of sense. 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. Now, can you talk to us about traction and adoption that you’re seeing with customers and users? Are there any numbers or metrics that you can share? 

Marcin Wyszyński
We are growing multiple X year over year, and that let me leave our metrics at dash has been way above even best market predictions. So we’re growing very fast. It’s not consumer tech where you just go boom and everyone uses flappy birds, right? With B2B SaaS, the adoption is obviously slower and we’re mainly targeting enterprises. So the sales cycle for enterprises takes a while because between the time someone discovers spacelift and they have all the necessary approvals and procurement signatures, et cetera, the cycle is longer. So there’s obviously not going to be like an explosion like with consumer tech. But we’re seeing extremely fast growth and we’re seeing growth in many sectors, but especially in the cloud natives finance, we’ve seen some growth, like very good growth with newer businesses like crypto, but we’re also seeing growth in traditional sectors like mining companies being our customers. 

Marcin Wyszyński
We have big pharma being our customers, very conservative companies. Like if you think about German pharmaceutical companies, that’s like the definition of being conservative. We can count them among our customers. So we’re seeing traction there as well. But if there’s one category where we have the fastest option rate, that is definitely what you might call cloud natives or digital natives. 

Brett
And I think there’s a lot of different definitions around cloud native and what that means. Could you just explain to us what that means in your view? 

Marcin Wyszyński
So if I would call a company cloud native, that generally means that their business and their engineering is built on top of technologies that cloud offers. So if we are trying to start that business ten years ago or even five years ago, the technologies that they are building on top of would not exist and they would have to build from scratch. Which means that capital investment would need to be much higher and that they just wouldn’t be able to get off the ground with the resources that they have to do. So we’re talking about things that use, say, AWS, primitives, like advanced technology, like IoT companies, right? I mean, if you had to build an IoT platform back in the day, the capital that you would need would be much higher. These days, IoT is like an off the shelf product, right? We use IoT core in our own platform and it costs peanuts and it’s super dependable. 

Marcin Wyszyński
So let’s say for companies that were cloud allowed them to build the business the way they built it and how fast they built it. I would call those companies cloud natives. 

Brett
In looking through the site, I see that it’s used by some of the world’s best DevOps teams. And just looking at some of those logos, I see DocuSign, Affirm, Figma, these are big companies, very respected companies. What do you think you’ve gotten right? What were you able to do to really build trust with these big name logos? And how were you able to rise above the noise and capture their attention and earn their trust so that they would start using spacelift? 

Marcin Wyszyński
It’s very hard to build trust as a new company. First thing you need to do, right, let’s say, is product. Our advantage is that we have a product with a verified market need. Actually, I build company based on the fact that people wanted something that I’ve built before. So we had that unfair advantage of actually having something verified market need. We knew that people wanted something like this and that they were not happy with existing alternatives, mainly because they told me, they approached me and there was a reason I built it internally. And that reason is pretty much as valid today as it was back in the day when I was building it. So I think I started in 2018 as my first draft of an internal tool for my clients. So market demand is there, product market fit, it’s always a moving target, right? 

Marcin Wyszyński
Because the product changes, the market changes. So the product market fit is never a given. But I think to a degree we can say we have a product market fit for certain types of customers. We do have it. We’ve also been I know it sounds funny for a startup, but we’ve been pretty conservative in a way. We’ve been building the product. We went security first. And so we have a security team that is by comparison, much larger than other companies this size would have. We design things security first and we follow the security practices. We stand up of security topics and we try to even be a step ahead of the whole security community consensus. And this was very important in getting trust of a number of logos. You don’t see some of the logos on the page because they are conservative. But you can trust me that getting trust of some of the companies that we count among our customers is quite an accomplishment. 

Marcin Wyszyński
And security is one of the most important aspects there. We have those developmental product development principles that are pretty much set in stone in spacelift. They go like this spacelift must be secure, stable, usable, and awesome. All the features that we’re building are actually awesome. The rest is actually non functional stuff, right? So if we’re not secure, we’ll take down the application. If we know that there is a leak, we’ll stop everything. We’ll stop the world if no features that you built are worth anything. If the app isn’t up, so the stable goes next. Coming from an SRE background, I’m used to thinking that things should be like couple of nines, right? And this is the mindset I bring to spacelift. Like, it has to work. Even if it doesn’t have the latest, greatest feature that we’re working on. Doesn’t matter. It has to work. 

Marcin Wyszyński
People are counting on it to be up, and it is up. We have like, insane numbers to prove it. And then usable is the next principle. So, okay, what good are the features if you can’t use them, if you don’t know how to use them, if they’re hidden, if they’re cumbersome? Right? I’m not saying that we are perfect there because I think we can do a lot better. But we are trying to bring IEC to the masses. So we need to make it simple, we need to make it usable. And ultimately everything else is awesome. And that comes last. Of course we’re trying to make spacelift awesome, but it’s not as important as stability, not as important as security and usability. And I think that ordering of principles is what allowed us to establish trust with some of the bigger brands, some of the bigger logos, and some of the more conservative customers. 

Brett
That makes a lot of sense. Now let’s talk about challenges. So I’m sure in your journey so far you’ve encountered one or two challenges in terms of your go to market. If we had to pick one challenge that you experienced and overcame, what was that challenge and how’d you overcome it? 

Marcin Wyszyński
Well, the biggest challenge was to get off the ground. If you’re a new company that says, oh, we need the keys to the kingdom, we need to manage your infrastructure, everyone is like, what? No, we don’t know you. Who are you? You want to actually have access to our AWS account? You got to be crazy, right? And so the biggest challenge is to get the trust, to get the few first customers on board. Now, weren’t the first company that would have access to your AWS account, but being a new company makes it very difficult. It’s very different if what we do is manage your calendar appointments like some of the other SaaS companies out there, or do something that is not that central for your company, like even an ATS system. Very important for the company to have a good ATS system, applicant tracking system. 

Marcin Wyszyński
But it’s not as core to the day to day function of your application as the infrastructure platform. How did we overcome it? Well, look, it’s a challenge that we face daily. It’s not that it’s a problem that is done and dusted. It’s just getting way more easier with every single logo that we sign. Initially, how were able to convince a few first larger customers is by getting warm interest from investors and finding people in our network that would trust us, that they needed such solutions. And they would trust us because they knew us as the founders personally and they would trust us personally. Similar with investor networks, if we could convince some of the best investors out there, people would look at our investors and consider that to be a proof of us being someone dependable. With every new logo that we sign, it’s getting easier. 

Marcin Wyszyński
That said, we couldn’t sign every logo on the SaaS version and there was a lot of demand for an on prem solution and so we ended up launching self hosted version last month. So as of last month, we’re no longer SaaS only. 

Brett
Got it. That all makes a lot of sense now. Last question here for you before we wrap up. Let’s zoom out into the future. So three years from today, what does the company look like? 

Marcin Wyszyński
Startup years are even worse than dark years. What does the company look like? I don’t know what the company looks like, but I can share with you how we make decisions about what the company looks like and what the company does when we have a core product and we’re looking for opportunities, growth opportunities or expansion opportunities. The way we look at it is we’re trying to see what did people do before they open spacelift and what did they do after they closed spacelift? What did they come to spacelift from and where do they go from spacelift to and in those areas? Are they happy with what they’re seeing? Is there an area where we could try to use our expertise, try to use our way of thinking and our existing infrastructure and code base to make their experience better? For example, this is how we invested in building ansible automation. 

Marcin Wyszyński
A lot of people would know use TerraForm for some of the stuff and then use Ansible for the rest. And it turned out that there wasn’t any comparable solution to managing Ansible and so they would very much appreciate if spacelift supported Ansible as well. It’s very similar to how we did kubernetes like people would provision infrastructure using TerraForm, which we originally supported, and then they would provision infrastructure. Some of the infrastructure now can be provisioned using Kubernetes. Now back in the day if you said, oh, I want to provision Kafka with Kubernetes, people would be like maybe not a great idea, but it’s a great idea these days. So people are leaving infrastructure world and getting into application world and that’s where Kubernetes is king. And so that’s how Kubernetes support was born and this is essentially how we identify opportunities now. It was more about infrastructures code, IEC platforms, but as we see other as we go into how people manage applications, how people do monitoring for applications, configuration for applications, we are starting to see opportunities where the products that they use might benefit from our unique insights, might benefit from the way we do things. 

Marcin Wyszyński
And so we might be able to offer either standalone products or extensions of an existing product that would meet them where they need the most. And so this is the pragmatic approach that we’re taking. There’s obviously a number of areas that we’re looking at, some of the initial feasibility studies or proof or box, we’re verifying that with some of our trusted customers. But there isn’t anything set in stone yet, so to speak. So I’m not going to talk about it, but this is the reasoning process that we’re using. 

Brett
Fascinating and super interesting. Now unfortunately, we are up on time. I’d love to keep you on and keep asking you questions here and keep digging deeper, but we’ll just have to save that for part two or round two. So before we wrap up, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Marcin Wyszyński
I suppose Spacelift IO is our website and from there you can continue your journey. 

Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and share your story and talk about that vision around what you’re building. This is all super exciting and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision. 

Marcin Wyszyński
Thank you Brett, for having me. 

Brett
No problem. Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast cast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.