Leverage your career in developer relations to prepare for starting a company

John Briton: Figure out the user interface here. So, hello, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. I feel like I haven't been on stage very much recently with the pandemic and all that stuff, so please give me a little bit of Slack with that. So I'm John. I'm the software engineer. I'm also the CEO and co-founder of Work Brew. We built an enterprise software management platform on top of the open source package manager Homebrew, with 30 million devices out in production running that today we're hiring. So come talk to me after if you're interested in that. Okay, so we've got a lot of stuff to talk about and not a lot of time. So the summary here is that I'm going to talk to you about my career and DevRel and how it set me up to be a founder. And I want you to come away with this with some minor changes to the way that you think about the way you work so that you can set yourselves up, whether it's to be a founder or whatever it is you want to do after DevRel, because I think as an industry, as a career, we have a problem with not having a clear path of what's next.

So, okay, why I'm here, let's see if I can do this. DevRel has had a profound impact on my life. I ended up in this role by accident. Have any of you, did any of you get into this on purpose? Who here was like, I want to be a Dev re person? Not many handfuls. Okay, less than half didn't work. So yeah. Anyways, I want to influence you towards making small changes to the way that you work so that you can have long-term benefits, and also to learn to identify the opportunities that you have and act on them. Here we go. So first of all, you need a plan. This thing's not working. You need a plan. So what do you want to do after this, right? We don't know in DevRel, there's not really an easy next step. Most companies don't have huge teams of DevRel people.

They don't have multiple layers of management or things like that. It's more, I was talking to somebody earlier today. I worked here for a couple of years and then I changed to a different company when I get bored. So think about what you want to be doing and how you're building towards that for me is I love wearing a lot of different hats. I love doing all the different things in the business, and I've always known that I wanted to be a founder. So as I was going through my career, I tried my best to make sure that I was learning new skills and setting myself up for the situation that I was going to end up in. So getting into DevRel, as I mentioned before, it's not particularly something that a lot of people do on purpose. For me, it was basically I was living in New York City applying to be a software engineer.

I had 20 something interviews in person. I got rejected from all of them. That's tech screen, and they said, I'm not good enough to be a software engineer. I saw a job posting from Twilio that said I could travel and teach people about code, and I signed up for that. It was the beginning of a very long and helpful journey. So there's not really a training programme for DevRel. I know that Adam and some folks are working on something, but there's not degrees or a standard way to get into this. A lot of people are doing it via being an educator first or being a community organiser at first. But it's really very unclear. Once you're in DevRel, how do you advance? What do you do next? In bigger companies, I think about things like taking on a wider scope of your role rather than just focusing on DevRel.

It moves into more of like a go-to market type of action. Things that you can do to advance your career while you're in this role is manage up and support your peers. I had a really great experience when I was at Twilio with my first manager in this space where she basically sat me down on my first day, set up, guardrails, said, these are the things you can do. These are the things you can't do. And also said, I want you to do something for yourself here. What are you going to get out of this? And make sure that we have kind of this Venn diagram of what's important and useful to you and what's important and useful to the company. That was a really valuable thing that my manager did, and I think if you're managing, you should be doing that with your team as well. Following DevRel, it might be that you move into a different department, you go into engineering, product marketing, sales to widen the scope. And then the last idea here is just change companies. I've heard that a lot from people I've been talking to today. Okay, so let's talk about getting out. So at the end of this road, my opinion is that I don't think that many of us are going to be able to stay in this position for a very long time indefinitely. So at some point you have to get out.

The other teams that I mentioned like product marketing, et cetera, they all have clear progression. You go out, you see there's a product manager role. There's thousands of people that have these roles. We're much more in a niche position. So think about how you can go to the next thing. For me, it was really all about how can I set myself up for success for the next company. So for me, starting a company was what I wanted to do. You should think about starting a company. There are a lot of great reasons to do it. You get to work on your own stuff. You can create something, bring something new into the world. But also there are a lot of downsides. It's incredibly stressful, it's difficult. Nothing here is easy. There's a lot of risk, financial risk, personal risk, reputation risk. What if I fail?

What are people going to think about me? So really balance it the way that you think about it. So this is kind the meat of what I wanted to get to. Some recommendations. First is take something with you when you leave. While I was at Twilio, like I said, I had this kind of overlap of what should I be taking with me. What I said I wanted to take with me was some sort of reputation, some kind of ability to be known or get to know people in the community so that I had a network when I left, doesn't work. There we go. Network as much as you can and log everything. I have a story about this just the other day. I sat down, actually yesterday, I came into New York City. It just so happened that somebody I met 10 years ago was in New York City at the same time at a Twilio event, and they invited me to meet and they're a VC investor. In that meeting, they remembered that we met at some point. They wanted to talk to me and they're effectively getting interested in participating in future funding and things like that with my company. And it's, you are out there meeting people all the time. You don't know who you're going to meet when you're going to meet them. Make sure that you're keeping track of all of this stuff and you can go back to it later.

This is one of my favourites. Double and triple dip. Whenever possible. Double dip is like the standard, but sometimes you can get three times the value. So an example of this is music hack day in New York City. I was really interested in learning how to do music coding. I got into that. I helped organise that event. It was a work thing because we got Twilio's and brand recognition was interesting for the community, but also it helped with bringing notoriety to the city, opening up a new event space in New York City and basically cementing my ability to be part of the community in New York. So it was multi value. All the different organisations that I were in were getting something out of it. At the same time, design your work to be highly visible in public. So I would look at GitHub as an example of this.

I was at GitHub. Everything that I did in the DevRel space was a programme. We tried to turn all of our standard operating things into something that had a name, had a brand, was out in public. And when you leave, when you're going out and starting your company, you're trying to show that you have a reputation. Everybody in the world can see all of your work. If you go back and look at GitHub, I created GitHub education. There's a whole portfolio of work out there that I can take responsibility for, and anybody out in public can see what you've done. Leverage a company's brand. I think this is pretty obvious. Try to choose to work at companies that will lift you up, not just the other way around. This is maybe something that is not always in your control, but whenever possible you should do it.

And within your company partner with other teams to learn new skills. So an example of this, while I was at GitHub, I partnered with the sales team. I had never done enterprise sales. I had no business doing anything like that. And I would go with them on ride-alongs and see how they did their job to learn what I could be doing out in the field that prepared me as a founder. So now I'm outgoing and doing enterprise sales myself. I have a lot more context and ability for that. And then the last thing that I'll say is assemble your team along the way.

I started in this field back in 2010, and every time I was in a new role, a new team, I started collecting people, building really great relationships and whispering in their ears, Hey, we should start a company someday. Would you be up for that? When the time came, I was able to pull two other people in as co-founders. And it wasn't like something they would flip a switch on and do just overnight. So you think about who you're collecting, how you're going to get those people to come. A couple of lessons learned. Some lessons can only be learned firsthand. People tell you over and over again that starting a startup's hard, don't overspend, don't over hire. You just have to make some of those mistakes to have the experience. When hiring used guardrails, one of my biggest failures in my career endeavour was hiring somebody without telling them what was expected of them.

It was my fault that they ended up not working out in the role, and it was because we expected them to just figure everything out. So do the job yourself first. Set up the guardrail, set up the expectations, and then hire for that. And then don't replicate. Don't try to replicate past success. I've done this over and over again where something happens and it goes to the front of Hacker News where it becomes very popular and then six months later I try to recreate the magic and it never works. So don't waste your effort on that. And then the last thing is a couple of perspectives. Now that I'm a founder, doing kind of DevRel work from my own company, representing your own company is amazing. I was standing at a booth the other day talking to people and basically they came up to me and said, Hey, are you going to build this feature? And I could say, no, I'm never going to build that feature, right? I don't have to go back to the product team and tell you. It's just like, we're not doing that. Sorry. Thanks. Thanks for the idea. I mean I, I'm being a little bit ingest, but you get the idea.

The importance of getting your early customers on board is so much more obvious when you're in the founder seat. When I was in DevRel doing this for other companies, I kind of let the business metrics just not matter that much. I wasn't trying to close a sale. Every conversation I have now, I'm always thinking about how am I going to use this to close a customer? And then, yeah, I kind of mentioned this, the ability to talk about your roadmap. So being able to say, yes, we will do that. No, we'll not. So with this, I'd like to say, just come and talk to me later on. I'd love to talk about your career, whether it's starting a company, I can help you find some funding and things like that. And then also, if you're looking for a job, I mentioned that we're hiring. Thank you.