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The Story

Building Without a Blueprint

When Anish left his role at Uber, he had firsthand experience of a growing problem: the chaos of managing thousands of microservices. 

At Uber alone, internal services had grown to almost 8,000 – far exceeding the number of engineers at the company. Basic questions like "who owns this service?" or "where is the documentation?" became impossible to answer.

To solve this, Anish and his co-founders created Cortex: a Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that helps engineering teams access, manage and improve their services. 

Think of it as a central hub that automatically catalogues all services across an organisation, tracks their quality, and ensures teams follow best practices, saving countless hours for software engineers. 

Armed with this vision, they won a spot in Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, but still no customers… (Gentle reminder: the deadline for the YC W2024 batch is today - don’t forget to apply!)

Sequoia led their Seed while they were still pre-revenue, a relationship that has stood the test of time as they participated in their latest USD 60 Mn round.

Creating a new category comes with a unique challenge: no one knows they need your product

Cortex's early days were a gruelling exercise in market education:

Early demos often ended with potential customers acknowledging the problem but not seeing enough value to pay for a solution.

Finding your point of attack… 🤺

Everything changed when Cortex identified one particular job title as their ideal point of entry: Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). These were the people whose job it was to specifically make sure engineering efficiency was at its highest. 

The SRE strategy unlocked another crucial advantage: direct access to executive decision-makers. The importance of executive sponsorship in software sales has been flagged time and time again by the likes of HubSpot and Insead. 

Because SREs typically work closely with CTOs and VPs of Engineering on critical reliability issues, they provide a natural path to the real buyers.

Define your value to your customer 🤑 

Working with SREs taught Cortex a crucial lesson about enterprise sales: while technical champions validate the solution, executives buy based on pain. This insight transformed their pricing strategy. 

Instead of feature-based pricing or complex ROI calculations, they learned to anchor their value to recent incidents or pain points. When a company had just experienced a major outage, the conversation shifted from technical capabilities to emotional value:

The strategy paid off. After months of struggle, Cortex landed their first major enterprise customer through a cold email to an SRE who had previously built a similar internal tool. 

More importantly, they had found a repeatable sales strategy: 

1. Find the SRE, 

2. Demonstrate technical value, 

3. Convert decision makers with a pain-point focused pitch, 

4. Repeat!

Here’s what that means for you… 

Finding your point of attack: Look for people who: 

1. technically understand the problem 

2. have organizational influence, even if they lack direct buying power, 

Converting them into sales: Technical validation isn't enough – you need executive buy-in. The key is translating technical value into business impact. Instead of complex ROI calculations, anchor your pricing to recent pain points (e.g., "This incident cost you $10M, we can prevent the next one for $10K").

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See you next week!

Rahul & Aryaman