Julien Delange

2024

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 06:10:20 +0000

2024 was a weird year.

On the positive side, I enjoy the work I am doing post-acquisition. I feel lucky to be where my career is heading, and I am extremely excited by what is coming in the next months.

I have been able to expand my real-estate footprint in Pennsylvania and buy a home. Being in Pittsburgh gives me space and brings me peace. This city gave me a lot: friends, safety and love. I was afraid that coming to the city will bring the nostalgia of the past. Instead, being there helps me to project in the future and think about new projects.

My main place of residence remains New-York for the time being. And while this is not my favorite place to live, it has strong positives in terms of culture, opportunities and diversity. One highlight of 2024 was seeing Justice live.

On the negative side, I became weaker in 2024.

I am less technical than before. I am no longer always looking at the code of the systems I work on. It’s a major flaw: staying technical gives an objective opinion based on facts (e.g. you know exactly how things work), and not subjective feelings. It’s the core of what makes a great product: you need to understand how stuff works to quickly fix anything wrong.

More importantly, I hate how I started to be weak, lazy and fat. I started to accept decisions I disagree with and make compromises. I slowly joined the train of the “fat and happy people”, where I compromise in the name of social unity rather than doing what is necessary and right.

This is not who I am at my core and needs to stop.

I will come back to my technical and moral roots in 2025. Write and review more code, shave 36 pounds of fat, act on first principles and do the right thing. I will also get back to ultrarunning and am already registered for trail races between 25K and 50K.

Learning Rust in 2024

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 06:10:20 +0000

Over the past year, I learned Rust. In fact, I migrated Datadog static analyzer from Java to Rust (more in this article).

I think Rust is a good programming language but also overhyped. It is very fast, very safe, but its learning curve is extremely steep.

I recommend Rust for anything that needs to be fast and safe. But anything else, I would recommend using Go, Java or Python. The cost of software maintenance always outweigh operating costs. As Rust is harder to learn and has fewer engineers on the market, you should use it only if you have to.

Do not get me wrong, I like the language and its ecosystem. But liking something is different from recommending its use in production without reserve.

For those who still want to learn Rust, there are the resources I used.

Books

Online Articles

The Rustonomicon on unsafe, data layout, threads, atomics
Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists: excellent (long) articles to re-learn Rust core concepts

What's Next?

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:10:20 +0000

Now that I exited Codiga and landed safely in NYC, it is time to think about what’s next.

First, I never realize what a post-exit life would be. My life went from full speed on building a product and a company as a solo founder to a full stop and having time on my hands again. I realize just now the impact of the sacrifices I made while building a company. Some relationships (family, friends, partners) are broken forever and there is just no way to rebuild them. There is also a feeling of void because you literally have nothing to do, and your brain was constantly working of building/selling/marketing/insert-your-favorite-thing.

I am grateful for everything that happened to me over the last few months. I never imagined this would happen to me so quick. I love what I am working on today, and I can’t wait to release the products we are working on. I am slowly rediscovering some very simple things that I enjoy and did not do for a very long time, such as learning a new programming language, riding a bicycle or read a book in front of a lake or a river.

The tech sector is still driven by irrational behaviors. In four years, we went from investor shoveling money to fund Ponzi schemes and “bored apes” to betting millions of dollars on AI companies with no clear path to making money or building a product.

Unlike crypto and the so-called “web3”, Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides real value. We are still in a big “hype” moment that started with OpenAI ; we need to get back to earth and see what the real value of the tool is. The biggest impact will not be on consumer applications (yet) but on B2B software. Established companies clearly understand this and learned their lessons. For example, Adobe did not wait for a startup to shine in the AI space (like Figma did in the collaboration domain): they invested massively in AI from the start and shipped a tool that delivers massive value very quick.

The majority of AI startups are overvalued today. Most of them have no differentiator and are just doing API call to OpenAI or other AI provider. There is no reason but such companies to be more valued than SaaS companies with respectable Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Great startups will be the one that have deep expertise in building, training and scaling models.

For investors, this is a great time to bet on non-AI startups, especially SaaS: they have less competition (hence, more potential revenue) and their valuation is not inflated like AI startups.

Coming back to the initial question.

What’s next?

This is what I want to do in the next 18 months.

First, I want to get my life in order. I did not invest as much time and resources as I should have while building Codiga. Building and nurturing relationships is a pillar of our lives and important for our well-being and sanity. There is nothing I can do to fix the past, but I can focus on the future and not repeating the same mistakes again.

Second, I want to invest my time in learning and perfecting my skills in AI. I will not necessarily specialize in LLM or generative AI (we probably already hit the limits of what is possible today - or we are closed to hit them), but I will learn how ML models work from the ground up. The goal is to understand clearly how to build, troubleshoot, optimize and scale models for a few dedicated niche domains. In this domain, the tiny corp is very inspiring.

Third, I will keep learning Rust. I think that while AI and ML have a bright future, low-level technology is undervalued and misunderstood. Too many people do not understand how a machine works and the underlying benefits of safe, clean and performant code. I recently re-wrote the Codiga analyzer in Rust and I have been very surprised by how good the language is and how fast it runs. I am planning to make Rust my primary language in the coming months.

Acquired

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 06:10:20 +0000

Today, I sold Codiga to Datadog.

This story started in 2018 when I realized that if I did not attempt to build a company on my own, I would regret it until I died. I started slowly and eventually left everything to dedicate all my attention to this project. From 2021 to 2023, I spent two years focusing solely on building this company. I enjoyed the thrills of flying high and going through many rough turbulences.

It’s not been easy.

I made a ton of mistakes and I lost a lot along the way.

But I have no regret about what I accomplished. I lived this story on my own terms. And this is what matters.

I did not start this company to become rich or have more influence. I did it to have the freedom to make something meaningful. I also did it to show that startups can be created outside of Silicon Valley. And that you do not need to have a team of engineers from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford or a FAANG company.

I am proud of what I did and what we accomplished as a team.

To everyone that took part in this ride: thank you. Whoever you are - current or past team members, investors, and users: thank you for everything you did.

To everyone that did not believe in me, ignored me or dumped me: thank you. You made me question myself, and I became a better person.

It’s now time for me to move to NYC.

I still have much to learn and I can’t wait to open this new chapter.

Thank you,

Principles

Sat, 28 May 2022 05:13:20 +0000

Last year, I read Principles by Ray Dalio, which enumerates principles Dalio used throughout his life to drive decision-making. It heavily influenced me to guide my business and personal decisions.

More recently, I read Good to Great by Jim Collins, which describes the characteristics of great companies (as opposed to good companies).

There are many commonalities between these books. They both describe principles and characteristics of what drives a company or life to success.

I wanted to do the exercise to gather my thoughts and enumerate the principles that influenced me the most.

It’s about the who, not the what

The most important in your life or business is the who, not the what. “Good to great” shows that all great companies care about the “who” before doing anything. Great companies were not producing anything initially: they focused on whom to hire and whom to fire.

The very same principle is true in our personal life. Our relations and interactions with others shape our decisions. Our friends and life partner can accelerate our lives or be a weight we have to carry until we die. It’s essential to select the persons you build a relationship with and help you drive you to success.

“Good to Great” makes the metaphor of a bus: before you even start driving the bus, make sure you onboard the right people inside the bus. When a careless, underperforming employee is on the bus, they will not help to drive it in the right direction (this is even more true if the person is an executive). When your partner is not supportive, this will put you down, affect your well-being not support your personal growth.

One final note is that the “right” people are not whom you agree with constantly. The “right” people will support your professional or personal growth and drive you to success. You need disagreement (either at work or in a relationship); it is crucial to be open-minded, discuss different opinions, value their merits, and move forward.

Embrace reality

We all love to fall for lies and distort reality so that it fits our vision of the world. It’s easier for us to live in our echo chamber and believe that we are “killing it” rather than face the harsh reality that we are not as good as we thought.

Whether in your professional or personal life, it’s crucial to face the facts, no matter how brutal they are. The earlier you diagnose a potential issue, the faster you can address them and move forward.

The recent economic crash demonstrates how people love to cuddle themselves in an echo chamber and avoid the hard reality that businesses are not viable. It’s common to find people unhappy in their friendship or romantic relationship without realizing they are not in the right place.

This principle is reinforced by the “who before the what” principle. When the right people are on your bus, they will help you face some harsh realities. The wrong people will ignore these hard truths and continue business as usual, only to drive the bus in the ravine.

Culture and discipline are essential

The culture of a company is essential. And it always starts at the top. Employees in a company mimic what their leaders do. When leaders are not embracing a solid culture, employees begin to be all over.

Company culture and values will shape who will be on the bus (e.g. who will apply for a job and who gets hired). Today more than ever, some companies put strong culture and values statements, and some employees apply (or not) to a job because of them. Setting up the culture and values of the company is a challenging task, and that is also why some companies are failing.

Discipline and accountability are also essential and must start from the top. If an executive fails to deliver, they should be held accountable and driven by example.

Your company is a team, not a family.

It’s essential to have the right people on board (see “who before what”) and to be radically honest if one person is not performing as expected for the team. Your team should be the winning one, not the losing one, and for that, you need A-players. And you need A-players at every position on the field.

I have seen companies with more than half of the people not adding real value. When such companies lay off the right people (e.g., non-performing ones), they often operate better because the poor performers no longer drag the high performers.

Identifying the right team is really hard, either when hiring or firing. But it’s essential to assemble the best team: you cannot win the Superbowl when your players are slow or do not know how to pass the ball.

It’s all about love

I firmly believe that what drives people is love. In the end, love always wins. Love does not mean that everything is all roses. It means caring, supporting, and giving a damn about something or someone. Love for what you are doing and who you are with. And always act for the best interest of the person or business you love.

Love does not mean accepting everything. Love can (and should) be tough sometimes. After all, who never had a strong argument with a colleague or partner? It’s normal, and you have this argument because you care and love the topic/person/cause. But in the end, the love and passion you have is a component that makes you discuss opinions, make decisions, and drive to succeed.

Follow the process

Thu, 12 May 2022 05:13:20 +0000

Often, I have found that having discipline is what matters the most to reach a goal. Have a process, follow and repeat it every single day. Most success comes from repeating the same thing every day and doing it, rain or shine. From a personal standpoint, I had only minor victories. However, I reached these personal goals by having a straightforward process and following it every day. I have lost half of my weight (from 300 pounds to 150 pounds) by eating boring meals made of protein-rich food and being active for at least one hour a week for two years. I completed my Ph.D. in 2.5 years because I worked 8 hours every day, including weekends. The ultra-marathons I ran are the results of running at least 70 miles a week for two years.

We are often tempted to go off-track. Skip a day. Or two. When we give up, we tell ourselves a lie: skipping a day or two will not significantly impact the outcome. In reality, we are not holding ourselves accountable and not respecting the contract we made with ourselves.

Your process/guidelines can (and will) change over time. The willingness to follow your process should not change. And the dedication to do what you committed to doing should remain the same.

Discipline is not only what will help you progress every single day. It will also guide you when you are lost. If you do not know if what you are doing is worth anything or if you are making the right decisions, all you have to do is to have discipline and follow your process. There is always light at the end of the tunnel.

On Culture

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 05:13:20 +0000

Culture is everything. It makes us feel connected. It gives us a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. Either in society or companies, culture is what bonds a set of people with values they all believe in.

From a business standpoint, culture is also what can make or break a company. Which is more important in startups: a startup is a cult, a religion. A startup needs to have true believers, people who trust a company can make the impossible possible. And companies with a well-defined and strong culture are the ones that are the most likely to succeed.

Take Amazon. New hires must read the leadership principles, a set of core values every single employee must follow. All Amazonians operate, breathe and live by these principles. If you do not embrace them, you will not only have a hard time working there but will ultimately be let go. There are simple, actionable rules everybody must apply in their daily work. For example, no slides are presented during meetings: all meetings start with a 1, 3 or 6 pages document that all employees must read before the meeting. Efficiency at its best.

Take Coinbase. Two years ago, its CEO made it clear that Coimbase is a mission-focused company and that activities that do not help or support the company’s mission will not be tolerated. At this time, this document made waves and a huge backlash ensued. But today, employees know what is the mission of the company and what is expected from them. And new employees joining Coinbase know exactly what to expect and what rules will be used to evaluate their performance.

Take Shopify. Less than a year ago, Shopify CEO also made it clear that political discourse is not welcome within the company. More importantly, he emphasized that the company was not a family but a team. The team must play at its best and when a player is no longer an A player, they must be let go. This clearly shows how employees are evaluated and what rules they should follow.

When culture is not defined or weak (e.g. no reinforcement), others will define the culture for you. There will be no common understanding of working rules and chaos will slowly but surely ensue.

Keeping a strong culture makes sure that everybody (1) knows the rules of the game and (2) will follow these rules, which is better for the company operators and the employees. For the company operator, it ensures that every single employee or contractor shares the company vision and is dedicated to making the company successful. For employees, it ensures that they are not wasting their time working in an environment they dislike. Some people may not like the culture and ultimately leave, which is a short-term issue and an opportunity to have new people with a better alignment with the company values.

So, you want to start a company?

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 05:13:20 +0000

Many people want to start a company. They have an idea, believe that making a product is easy and if you know how to write some lines of code, overnight success is guaranteed.

This post is here to put some reality in perspective. Entrepreneurship is overly romanticized through thousands of articles detailing the overnight success of a founder, company, or product. But it’s often not what you imagine and the success is the result of nights of grind, hard work, sweat, and tears.

Starting a company is incredibly hard. The vast majority of companies do not survive. A team works relentlessly hard on a product for months, only to see no users sign up (other than their family and friends). It crushes their hope of building something useful when all they need is the mental energy to keep iterating and make a product that delights users.

Building the right product is way more complicated than it seems. You may have worked in big companies that have thousands or millions of users but you have no idea how they started and got the initial users. Finding the right feature, what users (and not you) find useful is often counter-intuitive and requires many iterations and experimentation.

Assembling the right team is critical and is no easy task. You have constrained resources as you cannot offer the same compensation as other big tech companies. You need to hire “believers”, people that will understand and follow your vision, no matter how crazy it is.

Marketing and selling a product is a complex task that is totally different from writing lines of code. You need to understand how to present a product, how to define and refine a sales process to close your first customers. That is no easy task and you constantly need to learn from others how to do it.

If you go and raise money from Venture Capital, you need to talk to investors and articulate your vision to show the opportunity. At the earliest stage, people will believe and trust you to build the right company and it’s your responsibility to build trust and show them your progress week after week.

Yes, starting a company is fucking hard. If you are still up for it, know that customers will complain, your initial product will suck, you will have to fire employees, some people will betray you and investors will ask when you will be profitable. All of this with a high probability of 0 return whatsoever.

Do not take me wrong, I have no regret. As somebody that lost half of his weight within a year (from 300 to 150 pounds) and ran ultra-marathons, I enjoy the pain and I would not trade places for anything in the world.

Going on premise early is a bad idea

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 05:13:20 +0000

For a long time, I thought going on-premise was the biggest revenue driver for early-stage startups. I had this belief so deep in my brain that I planned to develop an on-premise solution for Codiga. However, after talking to other founders and advisors, I started to realize this was probably a decision that could sink an early-stage company.

Note that these advices/opinions may not be applicable for all companies or products. The following post explains my reasons, and I am sure it might not apply to many cases. Take this post as a compilation of personal opinions, nothing else.

It’s all about focus

Building a company (and, to some extent, managing your life) is about resource allocation (how you spend your time, collaborators, and money). When going on-premise, as the software is no longer deployed in your infrastructure, you need to provide a significant amount of resources to your customers, making sure your solution works seamlessly in their infrastructure. You are not in control of software deployment anymore and this is your responsibility to make sure your customers are happy. And you will inevitably spend time making sure they are.

In addition, as you need to sell to big customers and keep the flywheel going, you need to invest in sales:

Develop (and refine) a sales process.
Find prospects, schedule demo, follow-up every call, even when customers do not qualify.
Develop marketing to target some specific vital people.

Your focus shifts from innovation and product-focused company to a sales-focused company. As an early-stage company, your resources are very limited, and investing significant time in sales takes resources away from being innovative. Even if you hire a sales force (which will be limited to one salesperson and one customer manager at this stage), you have to allocate a few engineers to work with them and support the on-premise version of your product. These engineers will not work on innovative features.

The finance does not check out

Imagine you price your product at $40 per user per seat for your on-premise version. At this price point, to get $500,000 of ARR, it means you need to have more than 1,000 paying users for your on-premise version. With many accounts being around 50 to 100 users, you have roughly 15 accounts to manage and make sure they are happy.

To manage these 15 accounts, you will need at least one sales representative, two customer managers, and one engineer to debug or troubleshoot issues for your customers. These resources will already cost more than $500,000 per year, which means that even if your on-premise solution yields significant revenue, your business does not make a profit. You not only shifted your focus to sales (see previous point) but you are also not profitable.

The future is the public cloud

Some customers want to deploy on-premise and will always invoke some reasons for it (the VP of engineering/CEO/CTO invokes security reasons, some engineers claim that they can save large amount of $$$, etc.). The reality is that fewer and fewer companies will stay on-premises. Years ago, the narrative was about security: the public cloud was seen as being insecure/unsafe. Since that time, Capital One started to use AWS, new tech companies are starting in the public cloud and existing ones are moving to the public cloud (e.g., Twitter). Even the US government has its public cloud today.

The trend will continue. Companies noticed the trend and adapted, asking their customers to go to the public cloud. Atlassian is a good example and announces the end of support for the on-premise version of their product. The reality is that on-premise products will become a niche market and more costly to support.

Conclusion

The arguments presented above may not apply to all companies and should be taken from a grain of salt. I believe that early-stage companies should focus on innovation and Product-Market Fit (e.g., make something users want), not on sales to a specific niche. If your product is that good, companies may even have to adapt. 12 years ago, very few companies would have accepted to have all their company conversations and data stored on machines they do not control and today, the large majority use Google Docs, Office 365 or Slack. These products are so popular that these companies have no choice but to use these products.

The biggest issue when developing an on-premise version of a SaaS product at an early stage is that it forces you to reallocate your resources from developing a great product to selling and supporting an on-premise version. It will slow you from making a great product.

Of course, these arguments may not be correct at later stages when you can afford to allocate resources to develop a sales and customer support team without impacting innovation. But at this stage, you may already have enough traction and revenue not even to consider going on-premise.

The founder starter kit

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 05:13:20 +0000

After a year of founding Codiga and running it solo, I now have a pretty good idea about the good tools to use.

These are my guidelines to evaluate the service:

Least friction: easy to sign-up and offboard if there is an issue and/or you have better options
Transparency pricing: you can see how much you will pay on the website. Starting using the service does not require a call with a sales rep with shady prices.

Too many products and services require either (1) a sales call or (2) multiple emails back and forth. Ultimately, if they do not adapt, such services are going to die because:

they cannot scale (manual operations are expensive, which is reflected in the price)
people do not want interaction ; they want a service that works out of the box

Before you start

Register your company in Delaware (if you are planning to be backed by venture capital). Online platforms provide services without much pain, such as Stripe Atlas. Being in Delaware is essential if you plan to raise funding.
Get a lawyer. There are good firms around for startups such as Goodwin or Gunder
Get an accountant. A good accountant will take you few thousand dollars a year and ensure everything is on track, reported, and accurate.

What services to use

Email: GSuite is the industry standard to manage/handle your daily email, calendar, etc. Do not wait to get your google account started. Just pay $12/month.
- Security: make mandatory that ALL employees/contractors/collaborators to enable 2FA.
- Important: use Gsuite to sign up for services and use SSO authentication, so that enable/disable accounts is easy.
Accounting: even if I dislike intuit for their yearly spam notice about taxes, quickbooks is the standard for bookkeeping.
Slack: a must-have for communication today, start paying or switch to Discord. Just set your mind on the right communication channel.
Hosting: use AWS as they have plenty of discount with many VC. By taking AWS, you are pretty sure you will not pay any cloud expenses until series B. You will likely receive $10,000 to $20,000 credits until you raise series A and an additional $100,000 credits until series B. After that, you should have enough $$$ to cover your cloud bills or find better alternatives. And yes, you might prefer <another-cheaper-cloud-provider> but (1) they are not as reliable as AWS and (2) they do not offer the same discounts or services.
Design: sign up for Figma for your whole team. Just the best design tool I have seen for design. Signing up for any Adobe product pulls you back in the 90s.
Captable management: Carta is the industry’s gold standard, but (1) they are costly early-stage, and (2) their customer service is terrible. I recommend Cake, which costs me about $800 a year (vs. $5000 for Carta).
Source code management: GitHub is now the industry standard for source code management and all your employees are familiar with it. A good alternative is GitLab. Avoid Bitbucket because their user interface/user experience is terrible, the support for CI/CD tool is limited and the number of integrations is also very limited.
Monitoring: Datadog is just the best monitoring tool on the market. Easy to configure and use, you get your monitoring stack up and running in less than one hour.
SOC-2 certification with Secureframe: if you have a SaaS business and needs SOC-2 compliance, Secureframe facilitates all the certification/audit process. SOC-2 used to be a $70,000 to $80,000 line item ; companies like Secureframe automate a lot of the process and make it available between $10,000 to $20,000.