INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
There too much hype about mythical &10X developers.& Everyone desperate to hire these &ninja rockstars.& In reality, it smarter to find ways
of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have
That where CTO.ai comes in.
Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts
These automate long series of steps they usually have to do manually, thanks to integrations with GitHub, AWS, Slack and more
CTO.ai claims it can turn a days-long process like setting up a Kubernetes cluster into a 15-minute task even sales people can handle
The startup offers both a platform for engineering and sharing shortcuts, and a service where it can custom build shortcuts for big
customers.
What remarkable about CTO.ai is that amidst a frothy funding environment, the 60-person team quietly bootstrapped its way to
profitability over the past two years
Why take funding when revenue was up 400% in 18 months? But after a chance meeting aboard a plane connected its high school dropout founder
Kyle Campbell with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, CTO.ai just raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Slack Fund and Tiger
Global.
&Building tools that streamline software development is really expensive for companies, especially when they need their developers
focused on building features and shipping to customers,& Campbell tells me
The same way startups don&t build their own cloud infrastructure and just use AWS, or don&t build their own telecom APIs and just use
Twilio, he wants CTO.ai to be the &easy button& for developer tools.
Teaching snakes to eat elephants
&I&ve been a software engineer since
the age of 8,& Campbell recalls
In skate-punk attire with a snapback hat, the young man meeting me in a San Francisco Mission District cafe almost looked too chill to be a
But that kind of the point
His startup makes being a developer more accessible.
After spending his 20s in software engineering groups in the Bay, Campbell started his
own company, Retsly, that bridged developers to real estate listings
In 2014, it was acquired by property tech giant Zillow, where he worked for a few years.
That when he discovered the difficulty of
building dev tools inside companies with other priorities
&It the equivalent of a snake swallowing an elephant,& he jokes
Yet given these tools determine how much time expensive engineers waste on tasks below their skill level, their absence can drag down big
enterprises or keep startups from rising.
CTO.ai shrinks the elephant
For example, the busywork of creating a Kubernetes cluster such as having to the create EC2 instances, provision on those instances and then
provision a master node gets slimmed down to just running a shortcut
Campbell writes that &tedious tasks like running reports can be reduced from 1,000 steps down to 10,& through standardization of workflows
that turn confusing code essays into simple fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions.
The CTO.ai platform offers a wide range of
pre-made shortcuts that clients can piggyback on, or they can make and publish their own through a flexible JavaScript environment for the
rest of their team or the whole community to use
Companies that need extra help can pay for its DevOps-as-a-Service and reliability offerings to get shortcuts made to solve their biggest
problems while keeping everything running smoothly.
5(2X) = 10X
Campbell envisions a new way to create a 10X engineer that doesn&t depend on
widely mocked advice on how to spot and capture them like trophy animals
Instead, he believes one developer can make five others 2X more efficient by building them shortcuts
And it doesn&t require indulging bad workplace or collaboration habits.
With the new funding that also comes from Yaletown Partners,
Pallasite Ventures, Panache Ventures and Jonathan Bixby, CTO.ai wants to build deeper integrations with Slack so developers can run more
commands right from the messaging app
The less coding required for use, the broader the set of employees that can use the startup tools
CTO.ai may also build a self-service tier to augment its seats, plus a complexity model for enterprise pricing.
Now it time to ramp up
community outreach to drive adoption
CTO.ai recently released a podcast that saw 15,000 downloads in its first three weeks, and it planning some conference appearances
It also sees virality through its shortcut author pages, which, like GitHub profiles, let developers show off their contributions and find
their next gig.
One risk is that GitHub or another core developer infrastructure provider could try to barge directly into CTO.ai business
Google already has Cloud Composer, while GitHub launched Actions last year
Campbell says its defense comes through neutrally integrating with everyone, thereby turning potential competitors into partners.
The
funding firepower could help CTO.ai build a lead
With every company embracing software, employers battling to keep developers happy and teams looking to get more of their staff working with
code, the startup sits at the intersection of some lucrative trends of technological empowerment.
&I have a three-year-old at home and I
think about what it will be like when he comes into creating things online,& Campbell concludes
&We want to create an amazing future for software developers, introducing automation so they can focus on what makes them such an important
Devs are defining society!&
[Image Credit: Disney/Pixar via WallHere Goodfon]
