Tanagram Updates: November 2024
October felt like it absolutely flew by, but a lot has happened.
At the beginning of the month, I was juggling four areas: 1) company formation (closing my investment round, setting up payroll, some government filings, whether my 83b election had been received); 2) customer discovery; 3) product development; and 4) hiring.
Company formation is, as far as I can tell, done. I was worried about my 83b election for a while — it'd been 20-something days and I hadn't received any confirmation that the IRS had received my letter. Confirmation finally arrived a day after I called in — entirely a coincidence, as the call was not helpful, but I'd like to think the act of calling (instead of passively waiting) unstuck something in the universe. In other news, I officially closed my funding round and received cash in the corporate bank account. At my current burn rate as a solo founder, the interest on that cash will extend my runway by 15–20% thanks to Crescent.
I had several more customer discovery calls in the first half of the month with engineers across a range of seniorities. Their feedback was inline with the themes I'd been hearing: engineers struggle with the lack of technical, historical, and interpersonal context available to them. Those struggles show up in a wide range of symptoms and surface-level problems that are often unique to each company's technical details. Given the commonalities I'm hearing and some commitment from a design partner, I'm not scheduling additional customer discovery calls; I'm now building and validating ideas rather than seeking input for additional ideas. This is, of course, not a permanent state; I'll go back and forth between gathering ideas and validating them over time.
On product development, I've been building "GoToDef across services". It doesn't look like much on its own, but a) for a potential customer with thousands of repos across half-a-dozen languages, I think this is valuable enough to be an entry-point product; and b) the real product is the database underneath it. Each of the three features in the demo — "Go To Implementation", "Go To Declaration", and "Find All Callsites" — are implemented in about 20 lines of code on top of the database. That's on top of several hundred lines of "foundation" code for this small demo. That gap is where I think Tanagram can deliver value: namely, dramatically lowering the cost of providing all sorts of relevant context for engineers and encoding/enforcing technical policies across a company.
I've interviewed a few candidates for founding engineer so far. I've passed on three so far, and a few are in-process. I've also updated Tanagram's website to better describe how I'm thinking about the problem space. While I'm officially hiring for an "employee #1" role, I'm also open to working with someone experienced and entrepreneurial as a cofounder.
In November, my focus will be on hiring and building. I'm working with one design partner, exploring a few ideas that would be valuable in their work and for the engineers across their whole company. I'm also looking for a second design partner to help me generalize/avoid over-indexing what I'm building. An ideal candidate for this would be a staff engineer or engineering manager/leader responsible for internal frameworks/platforms, technical policies, or developer productivity at a company with ~1000 or more engineers. If you or someone you know might fit the bill, please reply and let me know.