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⚡️ TLDR

Most technical founders start by identifying a problem and then thinking about how to build a company. Sagar Batchu, CEO of Speakeasy (backed by FPV and Google Ventures, building API infrastructure used by major enterprises) tells us there are a few more important steps most founders miss prior to this. 

Building great technology is the easy part for a truly gifted technical founder, but what kills most technical startups is founders realizing too late that they weren't ready for the grind of actually building a company. 

Read on to learn Sagar's framework for both evaluating founder readiness and identifying the right problems to solve.

Before we get into it, here’s a quick overview of Speakeasy: 

Speakeasy makes it easier for companies to build, manage, and scale their APIs by automating API management and improving their performance, saving developers time and effort.

Wait! Are you sure you want to be a founder? 

Most technical founders focus on building a product immediately and Sagar notes that most wannabe founders don’t really know what they’re signing up for. 

Sagar’s point is that to get from 0 to 1, a strong product will only take you so far. You need to have a team that has the required commercial acumen to think of the business side of things whilst you are “founder mode”-ing the product.

Examples of this are endless in tech: Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students with an outstanding understanding of the search product, but needed Eric Schmidt as CEO to be brought in by the board to scale the business.

Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy got in Imran Khan, an ex-banker, to develop a monetization strategy. 

Find the Signal in the Noise

Instead of chasing the latest trends (... like becoming just another ChatGPT wrapper), Speakeasy developed a simple framework for identifying real business opportunities.

Sagar looked at 3 dimensions to building B2B products: 

#1 Lots of labour, no solutions

Companies were throwing large engineering teams at API development without clear direction

Similar to how Figma spotted design teams wasting countless hours on file management, or how Rippling saw HR teams drowning in manual employee onboarding tasks

#2 Unable to measure their success

Developers had no clear KPIs to measure API development success 

This mirrors Datadog's early insight that DevOps teams had no unified way to measure infrastructure performance, creating an opportunity to define the metrics that would become industry standard

#3 Willingness to pay, but no options 

Large companies were willing to pay for a solution, but existing tools were either too complex or not enterprise-ready - they validated this by securing their first customer through an "in-network enterprise sale" to prove willingness to pay at the enterprise level.

This follows the playbook of companies like Snowflake, who recognized that while open-source data warehousing tools existed, enterprises would pay significantly for a more polished, managed solution.

By focusing on these signals rather than just building cool tech for the sake of it, Speakeasy was able to identify a massive opportunity in API development tooling - one that would eventually attract investment from Google Ventures and grow into a platform used by major enterprises.

What this means for you

Once you have committed to being a founder, here’s how you can use Sagar’s playbook to finding an opportunity, by looking for enterprises that are: 

1. Just throwing bodies at a problem without a clear direction 

2. Lacking solid KPIs to measure how they are solving the problem, but just qualitatively 

3. Looking for a solution that they would PAY for 

Remember Sagar's golden rule:

If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with fellow founders and operators. Have questions about technical company building? Reach out at [email protected].

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See you next week!

Rahul & Aryaman