#134: Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter)

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:00:00]:

We're going after this whole hog. Ambitious with a goal for going public land. What that means is we know we'll be ready to be a publicly traded company when we have fundamentally disrupted the way people think about their software processes, when people start believing that they can measure these processes, that these aren't a sacred tau, that you don't have to put sticky notes on a whiteboard to get this done, that there are no sacrificial lambs, that this is all quantifiable. Understandable? And measurable, we will know we have started to win.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:37]:

Let's discover what people are building in the greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's Entreprenuership Builders land those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today I had the real pleasure of speaking with Andrew Wolf, the co founder and Co CEO of BloomFilter, proudly based here in the Midwest with headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. Andrew is a software engineer turned entreprenuership who is passionate about improving the ways people build software. Prior to BloomFilter, he and his co founder, Chris Stoll, co founded Skip List, a consultancy dedicated to refining the software development cycle land experience overall, which led Andrew down the path to work on BloomFilter, addressing the exact same problem. Space businesses rely on software development to solve problems, to deliver better user experiences, and ultimately to build valuable products. However, software development projects are notorious for missing deadlines and budget estimates. In fact, research shows that 65% of software projects are either challenged or fail, while 70% of software projects are delivered late, over budget, or are not delivered to the original specifications at all. Bloomfilter's patent pending process mining and predictive algorithms help software development teams identify bottlenecks in the development process, objectively predict project outcomes, and deliver software on time and within budget. At its core, Bloomfielder is a process intelligence platform and recently closed on $7 million in seed capital from investors like MVP Sequoia, HPA, North Coast Ventures here in Cleveland, Techstars Land, many others, we get into the nuance of software in our conversation. Andrew brings an undeniable breadth and depth of expertise, unapologetic ambition, and overall inspiring energy to our discussion. And it was a real pleasure to learn more about the work he and his team are doing to impact how companies today build things. So with that, please enjoy my conversation with Andrew Wolf after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90 as we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together and thrive by doing what they love. If you two are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you are interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to IA layoftheland FM. The link will also be in our show notes. So I was thinking about the most interesting place to begin our conversation today, and sometimes when I think about that, I try and come up with a hypothetical title for the episode ahead of time. And one idea I had for this title was The Human Cost of inefficient Software Development, which I would be blatantly stealing from you. But reading through Bloomfilter's Origins and your experience leading up to it, I was fascinated by how visceral of a problem this was for you and how intentional you were in setting out to solve it. So if anything, your passion for this space is evident off the bat. And so to start, I would love to hear where exactly this exuberance for software came from and how you came to care so deeply about it.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:04:43]:

Yeah, so I started programming professionally when I was 14. I grew up kind of tail end of the.com bubble when all that success was occurring and some of the absurdities of that time period. And I've always had a love for building things right and part of growing up really poor, there's like the American poor, and then there's how I grew up, which you can classify in America as extreme poverty, but comparing it to the rest of the world, it just doesn't seem fair. So I had to get a job early if I was going to go to college, if I was going to afford some of the even basics of life. And ever since I started learning, coding, doing it professionally, being a practitioner, moving more into being a professional, working on it not just as a contractor under the table, but as a software engineer at large firms. I've always had a passion, not only for the software development side of things, but the processes, the teams, just the flow of the machine. That is software development. I did my Undergrad at the University of Akron, I did my Master's at Georgia Tech and I've just always had this very deep and visceral passion around this industry. One, because I owe a lot of the great life I have today because of this, but also just I think it was something I could latch onto, something I could be really good at and something I could throw hours behind. I think that mixed with my I get bored with things pretty quickly. Not that I master them, but you pick up the basics of it and you get bored. But it really feels like in programming and software development, there's just so much to learn, it's ever evolving. Your basics today, your fundamentals today can fundamentally change tomorrow.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:44]:

Right.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:06:44]:

Like, generative AI pretty much overnight has redone the way we think about and execute software development. And so that inherent nature of the industry keeps me excited.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:58]:

And did you simultaneously always have this entrepreneurial inclination as well?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:07:04]:

Yeah, I'd say so. I've always wanted one of my core things. I love freedom. Right. July 4 is my favorite holiday, which is odd, but I love freedom. And I feel like Entreprenuership kind of gives you that freedom. Obviously, as you grow up and you start living life and everything else, freedom takes on a different meaning. But certainly entrepreneurship seemed like the way to not only financial freedom, but also freedom to build what I wanted to do, work on what I wanted to work on, and work with the people I wanted to work on these things with as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:41]:

So, somewhat selfishly, I have also been really excited to have you on the podcast to talk about the work you're doing because the nature of what you're working on has real implications for the work I do as a product manager and building software. Bloomfielder is addressing so many of these really interesting challenges that I faced. Leading a product organization where you're tasked not only with answering these questions of why land what should we build? Where you're pulling together all these insights from customers and stakeholders and the data you have to actually attempt to architect a product that will drive the business outcomes you're hoping to achieve. But I think as critically important are these responsibilities of shipping the product on time land free of surprises and syncing and aligning everyone in the company around a unified vision and strategy. Land in an attempt to plan to avoid divergent efforts and wasted time and energy, where you're answering more of the questions around expectations and things like when something will ship. And so in this context of the software development lifecycle, I'd love to hear how your experience has been in the space and maybe as a means to understand where the inspirations for BloomFilter actually came from.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:09:03]:

Yeah, absolutely. We look at software development by itself in a complete vacuum. Just the art of software development. Building something is really challenging in itself, right? You're building something that is there's no boundaries to what you can theoretically build on a computer outside of the von Neumann architecture, which is CPU memory and all. You know, you're in this endless space of endless possibilities, and the only thing that really brings that in is requirements. Land right. Or your trade offs and I guess how much money you're willing to invest. Then you start layering things in, right? You start layering in customers and the market and then your people, and then your process, and then as you alluded to all these things inside of software development makes it difficult. It doesn't really matter where you're at. If you're a startup, the difficulties might be different, right? You don't have the same scale that a Fortune 500 has, but it doesn't make software development any easier, it's just different, right? Finding product market fit is about iterating really quickly in the market to build stuff people want in order to be able to say yes, we can build a scalable, go to market motion around this product, and Fortune 500 might be able to have an existing customer base. But now it's about working in this hugely intricate enterprise with all these stakeholders and politics and all those machinations had complexity to it. And in my experience, I've worked across the gamut. I've been in a two person startup, I've been at a Fortune 500 company. I worked at a startup that went from 200 people to 2000 in IPO and things in between all those spectrums and throughout my career, whether it was processes and people or it was just how do we optimize building software for speed to market? It didn't change that. We had to do better in measuring what we were doing. And I think a lot of it came down to just did we feel we were doing the right thing? If we felt we were doing the right thing, then we kept doing it and if it felt bad, we would do something else. But it was never quantifiable, it wasn't even qualitative. It wasn't really quantitative either. It was this whole process around, god, I hope we're doing the right thing. And obviously in these processes it's even harder to get as you scale because you have multiple teams working on a singular piece of software. What really drove this mission home was a project I did for a local health care system. You could take a guess at which one and you'd be right 33% of the time. And it was for this diabetes monitor for children and it was ahead of its time. It was a little device that you stick on your arm, land use, infrared light. I don't understand how the device worked. I'm not a mechanical engineer, but there was an app component to it to get the readings and I was brought in to kind of rescue the project because the app was going sideways. They couldn't get the bluetooth to work, they couldn't ship on time, they couldn't get the interface right. Bunch of things around it and watching that project go through the motions I had seen previously at other companies and I'd seen other times just being put in the driver's seat with that much responsibility and then coming up short, and I could beat myself up all day about it and say, well, maybe it was my own shortcomings. And I bet greater than 40% of it was. But on the other side of it we could have done so much better, really drove me to the mission that ultimately built Bloom Filter, right? And is building Bloom Filter as a software industry. A common statistic is 78% of software projects are late, over budget, or don't ship. Right? Could you imagine if surgeons were allowed that statistic? No one would do surgery. No one would be like, oh, 78% of surgeries fail. Oh yeah, sign me up. No one's going to do it. And yet, as a field, as a profession, we're allowed this profoundly terrible statistic. And by the way, it was 68% ten years ago when Accenture did the original study. It's going up. It's getting worse. And if you look at the global trend, the software investments also going up, right? I think the CAGR for total software development spends up like 15% year over year. It's insane that we keep throwing more and more money at this problem and getting worse and worse results. And I take pride in being a software practitioner. I take pride in being part of this field, and I believe we can do better. Right? We help people build great, amazing software for sales and marketing and all these other business capabilities, yet we can't do it for ourselves. And I think that that's complete bullshit, to be honest. We absolutely need a system like BloomFilter to exist.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:13]:

It's really fascinating framed in that context. When you think about also just how much work thousands of hours are just spent on project management inefficiency in that whole lifecycle of building out the product. Why are we so bad at this? Why is it that everything takes longer than expected? Land comes in over budget. Why do so many of these projects fall off track?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:14:41]:

I mean, there are a lot of reasons, and there's going to be contextual reasons, for sure. But if you look at it, we can boil it down to really three. First, is it's really hard to understand the complexity? Someone says, Go build me a web page. I have to ask all the questions. Well, what do you want on your web page? Do you want it to be a light? Do you want it to be dark? Do you want it what kind of links do you want? Land text? We don't do a great job of defining work objectively. I think we've gotten better to your point of being a product manager. I think the art of product management and it's still an art, it's not really a science. I mean, it's just now, I think product management became a thing in 2012 almost. It hasn't been around that long in terms of an actual practice field in software development. So we're getting better at that. But for the longest time, we haven't been great at defining the work. So we've been working on amorphous deliverables and then saying, squinting at it three months. But then did you know all the details? Did you know all of the things that would go into this. I think on top of that, the other area is reporting in. Our field is wildly behind. If you look at a sales, use sales as an example, you can go in and realize that, hey, for each salesperson, they close an average of $10,000. I need $100,000 in revenue, therefore I need to hire ten salespeople, right? You can put that in a financial model. You can model that out. You can figure out if that's worth investing in. Can you make money? What would your margins be? And you could do that in a spreadsheet and get an answer within three to four minutes. There's nothing like that for software development. There's no real advanced statistics or even basic statistics, right? We invented our own measures, for God's sakes. We're like velocity. I bet if you ask a CFO velocity, they couldn't tell you. And if you ask two of them, they give you wildly different answers, and that's not on them. We invented our own measures of success and said, hey, we're going to judge ourselves based on this thing that we invented. But even the other ones, like throughput and lead time, reaction time, cycle time, I know you keep going down the list. That's really hard to understand. And then on the third, while we are in this Cambrian explosion of software tooling with things like Figma, GitHub, jira, all these amazing tools that weren't around even 15 years ago, they're still really nascent. When we talk about how many people have a project management solution for the software, the answer is only 55% of the industry that writes software have a Girotype solution. And so when we look at that level of maturity, we look at those three factors, it's not shocking to me that people look at the field and we have such a horrible rate. But I also think that we can't use that as a crutch either. We have to do better in saying, hey, we're not going to work on this project unless we have source control, unless we have a project management solution, unless we're using best practices. And as a field, we have to be professional about that and not just do what we feel is appropriate, but do what's best for the company and all the stakeholders involved.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:02]:

One more stage setting question here before we make our way to BloomFilter. So one of the perennial frustrating phrases that has often been the source of strife in my career so far, is that something to the effect of you can have it good, fast or cheap? And you had mentioned the trade offs earlier in our conversation already, but it gets to this idea that you're trying to balance time, money and scope, and it's very difficult to change one without affecting the others. Land the goal is to try and maintain the three of them to keep the quality of the output high. I'm curious if you subscribe to this kind of thinking or do you feel it's a false trade off?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:18:47]:

No, I think the iron triangle is very real. I think it's very real in a lot of fields too. For the record, I don't think it's unique in software development. But on the other side of it, are people aware of those trade offs? Are we doing a good job quantifying them and are we doing a good job communicating it? And I don't believe, because of lack of statistics and KPIs land even OKRs in our field, that our teams are doing a great job of being able to communicate exactly the trade offs the business are making. And we can go into examples on things like support and go into examples like, well, if we do it this way, we're going to have more bugs and helping people understand and simulate and see the downstream impact to their choices. Because as I mentioned, it's so amorphous without the data that it's hard for me to wave off all these future consequences of piling up technical debt or asking my team to work on support 24/7 because they don't have anything to look at. Can they really understand? And I think that's part of the problem is the lack of forecasting and the lack of helping communicate these things to people that otherwise can't really understand the implications of their choices.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:04]:

Well, as a segue to those topics exactly, I think it would be helpful maybe if you could lay out for us just process mining. And when you think about BloomFilter as a process intelligence platform, what does that mean exactly?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:20:20]:

Yeah, process mining is a really interesting field. One, because it's one of the few markets that I think Europe got to, first, in some ways, and second, because it's growing 74% year over year compounded. Right? So we have this huge growth field, 30, I think, a $7 billion field. So when it's growing 74%, something to look out for. And what process mining is, in the traditional sense of the word, is a system that sits on top of your ERP system. Think SAP, NetSuite, those kind of systems, pulls the data out via the logs, analyzes them and shows you what your process looks like. How does data flow through the system and lays out your process and then says, here's where you have inefficiencies in them. For example, every fourth invoice goes into the special accounting process that cost you $10 million every time it does it every time it does. And so if you remove that, you save $40 million. And that's taken the world by storm. And people that care about efficiencies and effectiveness. One, because Accenture and Deloitte and all these Big Four consulting firms can sell a lot of salonis or Signavio because they can basically go in, pay for the software themselves and then find millions of dollars in consulting work to help fix the Big Four accounting processes of apar and those kind of things. How this sits into BloomFilter is, as I talked about before, there's this Cambrian explosion of systems. What that also means is there's tons of data everywhere. Know before when you're storing things in Tortoise SVN and using Excel to do ticket tracking, you didn't really have this data. But now when you have Jira and GitHub, you can pull from the APIs, you can pull the data and apply some advanced data science to it to basically show how work flows through your system, similar to the way Solonus or Sengabio would do that in your ERP. So BloomFilter has a unique opportunity to sit on top of those systems, pull that data out and show you, hey, you have this work. It gets rejected in pull requests six out of seven times, and it gets rejected by QA four out of five times. This adds, on average, four days to your cycle time on any given card. Right. If you have four days to a cycle time and your average is three, that's seven days. That means each developer can get one card done per Sprint on average. In a linear world. Well, that process isn't necessarily going to help you ship fast. Right. Maybe that's appropriate, but you can see where you start having these inefficiencies by analyzing this data and helping people come to terms like, where should I focus on my process? Because the other thing that's interesting about process when we talk about it is no two companies look the same. Because no two companies look the same, their process is going to be slightly different and it's going to tie into their value chain and how the business delivers value to their customers. And that to us, is we want to meet people where they're at. We want to apply advanced techniques and statistics. We don't want to hand you the Agile Manifesto and the Scrum Handbook and say, go do everything in these books, because we know that doesn't work. I mean, everyone that's ever implemented any of these processes know that by textbook, you just can't do it because you have a different team, different people, different mindsets, and that's not meeting the team where they're at or where they need to be. And we believe by doing this, we can help people look at their process, find the inefficiencies that are important to them, fix them, understand the trade offs, land their process changes, and ultimately create a bespoke process that allows them to win and get what they need to out of their software development teams. Wow.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:55]:

Yeah, this is all very fascinating. When you were starting BloomFilter, given that diversity of approaches that companies will have to their own software development process, and also, I think, just notoriously the kind of goliath nature of tools like Jira and the breadth of places you could potentially choose to start to focus, how did you think about an MVP? What was the valuable metric that you were looking to tackle first in this kind of holistic process.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:24:29]:

When we started, our biggest metric was actually our same thing of what I call our Big Four now, but our biggest metric was around predictability, more importantly, predictability around commitments. And this is a bit of a moneyball statistic, is what we call it internally. The idea here is what really matters isn't your velocity, what really matters in your throughput, because those are going to be different based on your team. Right? A team does a lot of support, is going to have a lot of bugs and a lot of support tickets. Their throughput is going to be through the roof compared to a featured team that does features. The could have up to three X of throughput. So that's not a meaningful comparison. Nor is the ability for anyone to point the cards however they want. Right? Points could be anything, right? They could even be T shirt sizes. They don't even have to be a number. And so what we came down to is, yeah, we have those in there. Land we do want you to look at that, but what we want you to actually understand is if your team says they were going to get 20 points done land they actually got 18 done and they miss every commitment, there is zero chance that they will ever do what they say they do. In a quarter. They might come close, there might be good reasons for it. But commitments are the things that matter because the team knows they have goals to hit. And those goals are going to be hit when the team hits their commitments. And those commitments in the form of development and scrum is to happen every two weeks. If the team's kanban, they happen every day. Are we getting enough cards through to hit? If we're doing five cards a week and we have four weeks to hit our goal and we have 25 cards, there's no way we can hit it. We need to look at how we're committing, what we committed to and adjust. Right? Maybe we need more people, maybe we need to change the commitment, whatever we want to drive that conversation. And that was the biggest thing when we started the MVP of, like, well, how do we measure our teams hitting their commitments and give someone what I call not what I call leading indicators. Leading indicators have been around longer than I've been alive, but leading indicator to software development, given that a lot of decisions are based on lagging indicators or no indicators at all.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:38]:

So as you honed in on teams doing what they said they will do, this idea of commitment, and ultimately that's kind of how trust is built over time. What was the most surprising observation or kind of set of lessons that you learned in those earliest days, focusing in on that concept?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:27:00]:

What we found was very interesting, actually. We found two core things that a lot of teams never hit their commitments and we're talking in greater than 80% of them, even at some of the best run companies on the planet. I'm not going to go to liberties and talk about our customers that way and their data. But certainly some of the early people we worked to, these are brand names that you know, and their teams didn't hit commitments. However, the other shocking thing we learned was no one was really aware of why teams aren't hitting their commitments. Right. I think people would have these meetings where they talk about, well, what's at risk? How do we fix that? But no one will be talking about the actual issues causing people to miss these commitments. But when you start putting data in front of people, they start being have these real visceral conversations about their process. Well, of course I can't hit my commitment. You remove half our work from our sprint and add random stuff for sales every sprint. So yeah, we've never hit anything in our lives, but look at what you're doing to us. You're churning us pretty massively. The fact that we're getting anything done at all is a modern miracle and it started to drive these very good data driven conversations. I think the people from the business in quotations started to really respect, oh, I didn't understand that asking you to do all this support was affecting the amount of velocity you had. I never put two and two together. And so they started talking about work breakdowns and saying yeah, okay, so here's what we want you to do. We want you 80% on strategic work and 20% on support. And if I ask you to do more than 20%, I want you to push back. And then the amazing part, this was the most surprising. It started to change the way customer success and support at companies was prioritizing bugs because they knew they could only get so much allocation. It started changing the way sales thought about selling motions and how they knew if I keep asking for this non strategic work to get these small accounts, I'll never get the big accounts that I want. Because the strategic work to get those accounts, it really started to bring teams together around things everyone understood, which was something that I couldn't imagine in my wildest dreams. That a software platform to help people optimize SDLC would impact almost every area of the business in a meaningful way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:16]:

Yeah, that is really profound and it resonates more than I could probably articulate in this conversation. But I think getting at that a way to attempt to alleviate the tension that often exists between product and sales within a company is huge. And I think it often stems from that inability to be able to speak to the trade offs that you're making when you're deciding how much time and resources is going towards building new product versus supporting what exists already. So that's fascinating.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:29:54]:

So how do.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:54]:

You describe BloomFilter today, where are you as a company? I know you recently closed on over $7 million. I would love to hear about that process, building land, growing the company here in the greater northeast Ohio area. What does it look like today?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:30:12]:

Yeah, so we're about 15 full time people. We have some interns working with us over the summer. I think that brings our total account up to like 22 or something like that, which is fantastic in terms of how we place ourselves in the market. We're very much saying, hey, we're a platform that's still trying to find product market fit. We're still in the early days, we believe we have concept market fit, meaning we bat like 1000 in our sales process. Pretty much everyone wants to try it and use it, and they start to see value in it. So we're converting customers. We're still in those early days, and it's going to feel early for a long time given the ambition of our platform. So I don't want to make it sound like we're not adding value. We don't have customers or anything like that. We certainly do. We're growing pretty aggressively, which is also good. I love that. Keeps me busy. In terms of our know, our lead is Magarac out of Pittsburgh. We got a fair bit of capital up in Chicago, North Coast. Came in for a substantial amount on the round across multiple checks. Sequoia is in the round. So we have some really nice names in our round. And I think what it really came down to was every investor we talked to knows this pain, right? They've been in board meetings where sales has their numbers and say, here's our pipeline, here's what we need, here's how we're going to do it, here's how many leads. And it's very mathematical. And marketing comes in and says, this is how we're going to generate our leads. And accounting comes in, says, here's what we spent. And it's all concrete and knowable, and the math works. And the software comes in and says, oh, well, we shipped some stuff, but we're behind and we're going to catch up. And how are we going to catch up? Well, we're going to do some stuff. And it's very Fieldy, very much like but they're not well equipped. They've gone. And as a product officer yourself or a CTO, you know how this works. You go into jira, you export the cards, you put an Excel spreadsheet, you kind of create your narrative. It's how the board reporting works. And the lack of tooling in our space is astounding, and we want to change that as well. But because the board member or because the investors felt this on every board they sat on, the message really resonated with people land. So it was really around like, is this the team to do it? And if it is, do they have the traction we believe in, or can they get to the traction we believe in more so than about the company, because the idea resonated and the markets. 108,000,000,000 in the United States last year. This year it looks like about 130,000,000,000 is going to be spent again. The 78% number, like the Tam, is absolutely massive. You can build a salesforce size company in this vertical without going to any other vertical, which is rare to say. Usually you have to be a more generalized platform to get to that size. But this particular industry is pretty, one, growing aggressively fast, and two, is aggressively inefficient as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:22]:

So I think at this point it would be really helpful to understand an overview of what the product looks like today. When you think about helping organizations release great products efficiently and on time across some of these concepts we've talked about so far, like timing and capacity, land scope, and the data involved in the overall process take us through what that looks like, maybe even just from your own perspective. I know it's something that as an organization, you are proverbially eating your own dog food. So what has it been like to actually use the product and what are the kinds of outcomes that you're seeing in practice?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:34:09]:

Yeah, so the way we think about our product is not going to shock anybody maybe, but might be profoundly simple in this industry. So we start with initiatives, right. When we think about what do companies care about? Or they care about outcomes, what are outcomes but a set of initiatives to achieve those outcomes? And so what we said is, okay, the outcomes are set by the business and the the initiatives are where the product starts. I think eventually we'll get into the outcomes because I think they're really important and we actually want to pull those in as well. But we started in initiatives and we moved down to what we call portfolios, which is groups of teams against those initiatives. And then underneath that, there's the team itself, and then underneath that team, there's the project that they're working on. And then that particular project has Sprints or a time period elapsed on it. And that breakdown allows you to go up, land down the stack and care about what you care about. A CTO CPO CIO doesn't really care how your Sprint went yesterday, right. A project manager really does. And so you want to be able to support each one of these personas in a unique way, but that CTO CPO CIO might not care about what happened to Sprint. They certainly care about where they have risk to their initiatives, where they might have teams that are off track if multiple teams make up a given initiative. And they might care about different organizational issues that seem endemic across all their teams. Like, for example, one of our customers found that they were not deploying every day. They were deploying only on Fridays. And when they asked why, they realized they didn't have the testing resources available. Well, that's something a CIO CPO CPO can fix. That software Executive and so our platforms around this persona and it's ultimately aimed to answer three questions what are you going to get? When are you going to get and how much it's going to cost? And so when you look at that, each one of the views has those answers kind of laden in on it and it starts to answer questions like, one of the financial views we have is how much money did you spend on strategic work versus non strategic work for this team? And the answer is going to really matter in the context of the team. It's the support team, then, boy, I really hope they're not doing a lot of strategic work at all because that's shocking and a misuse of their time. Conversely, if I have a brand new greenfield building a net new platform and they're spending 80% of their time on support, I'm also terrified because, boy, I'm not going to get my new platform anytime soon. And so helping people understand costs and where efforts are spent, knowing what tasks they're working on and things like that. Land helping people work up and down, if you think about the gear abstractions of Epic done story and then layering in some additional information and then ultimately that's all. Layer two is also okay. So I now know that I'm not going to get what I want, when I want it, and for the cost I want. Why is that the case? Land helping you look at your process and say, okay, I see that QA is rejecting every card that comes to their way at least twice. I need to take a look at this. Is that because upstream product isn't giving good definition? Is it because the designs aren't being iterated enough on figma? Is it because the engineers are sloppy and delivering buggy work? And we can tell that by looking into the system and saying, hey, for every car that goes into QA, two more bugs are created and we can start layering in all this amazing data into this story and narrative around your process so that you can say, okay, as it stands today, I'm not going to get this. But if I fix this, this and this, I can reduce cycle time, I can reduce lead time and reaction time, and I can get an extra 15 days across a six month initiative back. Which puts me closer to target and those kind of helping people layer in and understand not just where they're at from a pure, but also how to fix the situation they're in and then ultimately measure that right, measure the deltas, if you will, of I made this change. What happened wasn't improvement or was it a regression? And all that goodness that comes from a continuously monitoring process and continuously understanding it in terms of dog fooding, where it's changed. We're a small startup, right? Just 15 people, six developers. But when we dog food our product, the really compelling part about that is it kind of changes the Sprint review and helps us iterate a little faster and then start optimizing what we care about. So something I care deeply about in our engineering process is cycle time. Right? Again, when I talk about iterating fast to get the product market fit, well, that's the only thing that matters, is can we get stuff to our customers where they can give us feedback so that we can come back and implement that feedback so we can go back to them? And how quickly can we do that? Because that's what's going to make us win. Right. Could Elastian build this? I mean, they tried like five times and they didn't, but they might succeed in the six times. So the way we're going to beat them is they can't move nearly as fast as we can. So what we can do is move fast. And it helps us drive that conversation, look at the data, and really understand where we're at. Even as small as we are. It really does. Our process is pretty lean, so it's not telling us about QA because we don't have QA, but we've just got design, so we want to make sure it's design getting delivered into engineering very quick too. So we can also look at our upstream process of definition, design and all that and start looking at cycle time there as well, and really understand how quickly does work get to our development and how quickly does development take that and get a meaningful artifact to our customers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:11]:

So you mentioned just there at Lassian and Prior, though you had mentioned kind of a lack of tooling, which is interesting to me because while I understand that that sentiment, I think in the unmet need for lots of parts of the overall software and product management process. I also simultaneously think there's been this huge proliferation of tools in both kind of work management and knowledge management. And there seems to be so many companies that have sprung somewhat out of nowhere in the last two, three, four years. So I'd love to get your take as a participant in this landscape, having used a lot of these tools and just watching the whole ecosystem itself evolve, how do you think about Bloomfilter's differentiation in contrast to what is out there?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:41:01]:

Yeah, so I may have misspoke. I do agree there's tons of tooling, more tooling than there's ever been, and that's always going to be probably true. But there is certainly that Cambrian explosion we talked about, specifically around opinionated analytics, around how your software development process going. There's almost no tools in this space. There's developer efficiencies, there's other things to help you understand how products do, but there's nothing really in the space we're in. And we'll talk about who we're competing with in a second on that area because, yes, that in terms of the tooling that exists today, I think we have a lot of systems of record. Right? So Jira is your system of record for project management. GitHub is a great system of record for your source code and potentially your CI, CD, Circle, CI, AWS, these are all really great systems that will tell you, hey, you have a server or you have a code base, and here's how many files you have. And this is where you have your repos, and this is where you have your cards. And upstream, there's Sigma. This is where your design assets live. This is where if you go further upstream, product board, AHA, this is where some of your ideation and card creation exists. But at the end of the day, pulling those together. Land understanding them is a completely manual experiment usually done in Excel. In today's world, in terms of competitive landscape, there's really three competitors to us. The first is these developer efficiency tools, right? Land I can look them up. There's swarmia, there's jellyfish. And again, I think for what they do, they're perfectly fine, which is saying, are your developers actually working? And I don't know if they do their job or not. Again, we've talked to people. We've heard good and we've heard bad, and just like any product, but they don't answer the full question. Okay, so your developers are working great. Are they working on the right thing? Are they actually delivering that thing? Are they being efficient? Is their process working around them ultimately? Are they going to burn out? They don't answer those types of things. They just help. You know, that Jeffrey delivered some code today, and I think that that's useful, but I don't think it's the full narrative, and certainly it's not going to help you save money or save your project or anything like that. The second area that I think people focus, another competitor is people have built manual Excel spreadsheets. When I'd say I've seen the Mona Lisa spreadsheets, some of these things are just like, wow, I want to take a picture of this. It's a completely amazing testament to human ingenuity to get some of this reporting. And one, people are very entrenched in the work that they do. They really believe in their numbers, and their numbers are probably right for all intents and purposes. But the manual, we're just going to spend 10 hours a week keeping our reporting up to date in this Google sheet or this Excel spreadsheet. This is not great. That's not what humans should be spending their time on. It's just not something we believe is while we're competing for mind share on that, it's not a huge area. And I'll be honest, that's 95% of this market. I don't think we've ran into a competitor that I just mentioned from a software platform any of the hundreds of companies we've talked to. Which is kind of insane to think because we've talked to some really nice logos over the past year and some months and the last one is really consulting services land some of which are competitive, some of which aren't, some of which I think can be partners. And IDC has a service called Metri where they'll come into your company and $90,000 for two projects. They'll come and audit your process and help you understand where to fix it. So you get a nice report read out at the end. That's pretty static if you want it audited. Again, another $90,000. And we compete with them, but on a cost basis. It's just hard for them to compete against us in terms of if we can get the same thing, but it's continuous, we can do it cheaper because we don't have to deploy consultants. That's something that would be a competitor to us. There's other areas of competition here in terms of, I think some agileists and agile shops think what we're doing. You can't really measure software development. Obviously we vehemently disagree with that or we wouldn't be doing this. So we're going to run into some of those fringe thinkers that think this whole thing is a black box, it's not worth measuring, stay off my developers kind of mindset. I'm sure you've met some of them too on that side. We run into that, but then for every one of those we meet, we meet a very open minded person that's in the agile community that maybe even more than one, maybe it's a two to one ratio of people that are like, you know what, this does need to get better. And I'd love a tool like this because I can take it to my customers and show ROI on my services. I can help them realize the benefits of agile and I can help build better processes for people. And they're in it for the right reasons. They don't want to just build wires. They want to make real impact to these organizations to help them build scalable processes that help them deliver software in a predictable, land, reliable way. And in that sense, those people are the people we'll partner with that will help us go to market. It's a great go to market motion for us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:28]:

I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask about how you attempt to overcome that resistance to what I feel is often almost a religious commitment to this entrenched ritual of software development practices that is quite not so open to change often. So that's an interesting perspective. And on the Excel front.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:46:54]:

Of the.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:54]:

Takeaways I've had from building in the space and talking to other founders is the degree to which just almost all enterprise software seems to just compete with Excel. It's just this like goliath incumbent to a huge proportion of software as a service. It's fun to think about actually how much is just run on spreadsheets.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:47:17]:

It is disturbing. But again, some of these spreadsheets are a lot of fun. Man. If you told me that we did something like we built anything incredible, some innovation like SpaceX, randoms expel, I would believe it. Lay, I be a little disappointed. But I would be like, yeah, that tracks. That's definitely how we got people on the Moon land, how we're going to continue to get people in space.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:42]:

So with all of this laid out, what does success ultimately look like for BloomFilter? How do you envision the future of software development and what is Bloomfilter's role in that and helping to shape that going?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:47:59]:

So, you know, one of the things that me and my co founders set out to do when we built this is build a publicly traded company in the Midwest, right? When investors ask you that question, that's the standard answer, because you shouldn't answer anything else. If you're a founder listening to this, that's the only right answer to that question. But we really believe it. We really want to do this, and none of us really need another exit. We're certainly not going to sell for a small amount either way. So we're going after this whole hog ambitious with a goal for going public. And what that means is we know we'll be ready to be a publicly traded company when we have fundamentally disrupted the way people think about their software processes. When people start believing that they can measure these processes, that these aren't a sacred cow, that you don't have to put sticky notes on a whiteboard to get this done, that there are no sacrificial lambs, that this is all quantifiable. Understandable? And measurable, we will know we have started to win. I also think we'll know we started to win when other people start to believe that software can be on time. We talk about 78% of projects being a failure internally. Our metric is 78% of software projects should be a success. People should be able to go into software projects believing that this is going to be on time and on budget. And in the rare exception, it's not. They should be able to quantify and understand why they missed and fix it. We should turn this from being an art to science. I think the last metric for us is when we've really started to convert people to understanding that process isn't something that's on a book somewhere that you can read and pick up, that it's a set of best practices. It's a set of we're going to do this, but we're not going to do this because this is what's best for the company and the context I'm working in. And when we get there, when people start earning their complexity around their process and really start to understand that you don't have to be dogmatic about this, you don't have to protect it, that this is just another business process, that this is just like accounting or sales or marketing, that's when we know we've won. And that's how I'll know. Hey. Yeah. We're not only ready to go public, we're priority and be a multi company at that point, of course, but we'll know we have had the impact on the market that we want to have.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:34]:

I love the explicit call out of ambition. I think it's actually really important, particularly for the Midwest and where we are. I find that it's somewhat underplayed, and often we maybe don't even know how ambitious to be. And I think setting that bar really high and showing other ambitious people what can be done, it just kind of amplifies the whole space around. So that is very cool.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:51:08]:

Yeah. And by the way, I think everyone should be ambitious. New York gets credit for Rockefeller because he moved there. But we are the city of Rockefeller, right? Standard Oil, which is one of the largest, most important companies ever built, and the only way it was stopped was an act of Congress that was built here in Cleveland. And I think that everyone should really understand that you can build great things really anywhere, not just exclusive here in Cleveland, but we should aim to do big, great things. And we shouldn't hide from it. We shouldn't run from it. Of course people are going to listen to this and call me an idiot. Thank you. I need more haters anyways, right? For me, I don't run away from that. So, yeah, it might sound silly, it may sound stupid, but you know what? When we do IPO and when we are successful, we have this big great business that has transformed the industry. It won't be because we shrank from it. It won't be because we hid from our potential or what we could be. It's because we embraced it and we were bold about it. Land we said, hey, no, this is our line in the sand. And yeah, things happen. Of course things can come up. Of course a myriad of things can stop you from doing it, but there's no sense in shrinking from a huge outcome just because it sounds silly to lay. We should have the exact opposite. Right. The fact that we are from Cleveland should allow us to be more ambitious and almost demand that we are because we don't have these big, great things like we used to. And I think we absolutely still can. Land we just have to rally around, holding each other accountable to living up to our potential and doing great things. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:54]:

Well, I certainly hope it's not criticized. Ambition is somewhat malleable, and I think elevating it in the way that you're trying to should be celebrated.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:53:04]:

I appreciate that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:05]:

I'll ask you one more topical one, as it's just impossible to not think about or see in the last few months, but it feels like AI figures into Bloomfilter's product and mission because you have all of this process, you know, Ripe for training models on top of lots of data, lots of transactions or processes that you can map. And that's all in the wake of these really exciting, I think, productivity and forms of leverage for software developers with things like AI assistance for coding. How do you think about the promise of artificial intelligence as it pertains to BloomFilter?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:53:48]:

Yeah, so we've already started using it in some of our internal mappings and data science stuff because it's absurdly better than the algorithms we had before, even out of the box. The next step for us is, I believe, where it's profoundly I use that word a lot today. Impactful is around communication, right? I've never been a CFO before. I've never been a CLO before. I have been a CEO, but I've also been a CTO, so I kind of understand how those two roles want to be communicated to. But being able to generate different reports from different people's perspectives is something generative AI actually does really well at. Right? You can go into Chat GBT and say, hey, tell me about football through the lens of a therapist. And it will do it. And it does a pretty hilarious job, by the way. And you can think of any combination. I promise you it'll take a couple of hours, but you won't stop laughing the entire time. So it can help you communicate better the same data. Right. And again, we talk about how do we help people understand trade offs? Well, we meet our audience where they're at, and generative AI can help us do that. I think in the long term, we can help people generate better processes, find issues in their processes that the otherwise wouldn't see, and help people really say, hey, around this. How should I optimize my team? Right? How do I generate the best team for this project based on all the data you have? That's something you couldn't do today because you think you have all these different aspects of the team and you know them as people, but the computer will know them as data. They'll know them as, hey, here's how this person likes to work. This is how this person likes to work, this is how this person does actually work. And help really look at factors that just so many attributes that a person couldn't possibly get in their head. And I think that's where it gets really exciting here of long term, using our data set to apply those kind of things and not just processes, but team is part of process, how you put a team together as part of your process. I think there's a huge amount of generative AI stuff that we can do, and we're already doing it, some of it. But I get routinely like five AI newsletters a day, and I feel like it's still not enough to keep up with the amount of innovation in the space.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:13]:

I want to ask a few kind of reflective questions about your journey over the last few years. So one of the endeavors you had prior to BloomFilter was working at skipless. And I'm curious when you kind of contrast those two experiences where prior you got to work with many different businesses to help them grow versus here at BloomFilter where you're essentially all in on it. What do you think are the best reasons to be all in? Land start a new company versus opting to work with a breadth of existing ones.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [00:56:53]:

So the difference between services get both of the services from product are pretty night and day. I'll talk about the service experience. I think it's really important. It's great waking up every day, land knowing you're going to work on a new, exciting project for a different Fortune 100 customer than you did the next day, and you're going to have these myriad of challenges that you wouldn't get, and you get to see a breadth. One of the things that inspired Bloom Filter was we saw this problem at every Fortune 100 company Skiplets worked with, and I think the total was 15 when I left. There is across that the Fortune 500 companies, the startups, the Series C and Upstart. We saw a crazy diversity of process issues that helped us underpin a lot of the thinking in Bloom filter, which made us subject matter experts in a way that we might not even with our experience as software developers, I doubt it would have been to the breadth that we had knowing we went through that skip list journey. Now, granted, we had a lot of people scaling people is really difficult, even at product companies, but it's especially hard when your entire revenue is tied to scaling people. And so there's some innate problems with services companies that are uniquely managerial in nature. And the there's also customer issues of like, well, I know you're billing me 40 hours, but I don't think you did 40 hours of the work. That just don't happen to our product company, right? Did we install the product? Are you using it? Okay, then you are going to pay me. Right. And so it's a different issue in terms of what I would do is if you don't have an idea, I think one of the best things you can do is go and experience people's pain. And I don't know if there's a better way than selling services to experience people's pain at scale. Right. If you can find five or six people and say, hey, I'm selling a service to do X, you can really find some amazing ideas. There's so many inefficiencies everywhere that when you sit down with more than two to three companies or people, you'll find that there's some commonalities between them and then you'll be able to build a solution that solves their problems. And the best part is, if you're really good at services, you have your first five customers right there, right? We sold a lot of the initial. Bloom Filter customers were skipless customers because they were super interested in what we were doing. We were able to market and sell to them. So we had initial go to market movement just from having done this and had building goodwill in the world. I say if you have a great idea, great, go test it, build it, iterate on it. But if you don't, great. You could still go start a business, build great services business, and then they sell for one X, two X revenue, which could give you the opportunity to go and also fund part of your startup as well. So I think it was great that I did both and I think certainly Skip List helped lay the groundwork for what BloomFilter is today, and we're way better for it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:59]:

Were you to attempt to temper the ambition that we were just talking about, if you're not ultimately able to achieve it, what are you most worried about as the prospective reasons why?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:00:15]:

So I would say the top reason we think about this every day that we build a vitamin, not a painkiller. Right? What I mean by that is a very VC thing to say. So I'll backtrack my VC talk and say that means we built something that people wanted but didn't need. Right. Land. I worry about that every day because I know there's a visceral need in this market. I've lived it, I've seen it. But there's a big difference between knowing there's a need and executing towards that need. And there are a lot of proverbial bodies on this hill, right? And so you have to kind of look at that and say, all right, why did everyone else not succeed? Was it the state of the industry? Was it the idea is impossible? And all of that. And so that's my number one. I think if you gave me a number two, I would say that we mess up our go to market motion and I would lay that that one is more of a risk of not becoming as big as we could and becoming something meaningful, but not huge. If you have huge ambitions, a $20 million arr company, which would be a smashing success in any other sense, becomes like, well, that's cool, but it wasn't what we wanted. I think there's tons of ways to go to market here and that's great, but when you have a lot of beachheads, which beachhead becomes the most attractive one? And the having to pick that and putting our flag, given that we're a small company, we can only commit to so much at one time. We have a really talented team who's really good, and my co CEO is really great at this. So I worry less about than the first one, which is we just didn't build the right solution. Although, again, when you get enough at bats, you can do that, you can figure it out.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:06]:

What are you most proud of?

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:02:08]:

So far on this journey, it's definitely the team. I mean, I wake up every day well rested. That's something not every founder can say. And that's because my team is incredible, right? Like, Blake Squire's Mean, he takes care of so much stuff that it's an unsung hero work. If, you know, Eric's great at the go to market motion, I'm able to head up the product. Land customer success. And Chris is a great CTO, and everyone underneath us as well, the people we've hired, our head of CS, our head of Mean, head of product. We have just so many incredible people that take their job, find really great meaning in it, and get their work done every day. And the ability and the velocity in which the company moves is inspiring to me. And it's just like, you can never take that for granted when you've built something really big. Land I remember a year and some months ago when it was me going to Chris and saying, hey, you want to do another venture with me? And him looking at me like, what is it going to be? I'm like, oh, it's a product company. He's like, okay, tell me more about it. And then BloomFilter became Chris, and then it became two. Like, I remember sitting in a car, driving back from Chicago with me, Chris, and our two developers when we just finished up Techstars before the rest of the team came together. It's been an incredible journey to get to 15 people in the time of spam we have, but it's really a testament to everyone's hard work and again, not just the shared ambition of building something truly great and hard not to be proud of that.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:49]:

Yeah, that's fantastic. I'll bookend our conversation here, leaving space for one more question, which is kind of a non question, but if you feel like there's anything particularly important that we haven't talked about as part of your journey, BloomFilter or otherwise, that you'd like to share.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:04:10]:

I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this, and we get to be the fortunate ones that just raised in this tough environment. But I led skipless through a pandemic, a mild recession, and then partly this economy, now leading a company through arguably the worst fundraising economy on the know. I will say there hasn't been and this is kind of like a tautology, in a way. Land I'll get to that in a second. But there hasn't been a successful company that got really big. Google, Facebook, you can just go down the list if we wanted to, but that didn't go through a recession or a time like this in their early days, and it galvanized the businesses that they had, and it made them better. They had to be more frugal, so they became more capital efficient. So their margins are higher, and there's tons. You can go look this up. It's very fascinating. I'd say that all to say is part of being a startup is going through these hard times and don't look at and say, well, this is really hard, and shut down or anything so you can't get funding. I think there's tons of opportunity in sticking through it because you'll be better off in the end. And I think a lot of people are talking about this, but it's good to hear it from a founder of like even though we raised a bunch, even though we look like we're killing it, every day is still a slog for us. Sales is still really difficult, and it was hard before, but now it's, like, really hard because every dollar is scrutinized at these companies. But I look at the positive side of that. That's going to make our sales pitch better. It's going to make our marketing better. It's going to hone our skills and our instincts as a company to lethal levels that down the road, when the economy is great, we're still going to have those instincts of the company land. We're going to be better off for it land. So when the going gets tough, you just got to get going. I guess that's the point of that whole ramble.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:14]:

All right, well, we'll bring it home here with our traditional closing question, which is for a hidden gem in the area. So not something that is necessarily your favorite, but something that other folks may not know about, but maybe they should.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:06:30]:

I don't know if people know about this because I'm kind of a boomer now that I have kids, so I'll say this straight up. So I don't know what the cool kids are doing, but Jaja in Ohio City, if you have not been I think it's one of the best restaurants in the area, and I think it has some of the best ambiance, too, in the area, too, for, like, a sit down, date night kind of restaurant. So I fully recommend it. Again, I don't know, jeffrey, am I insane here? Is this something everyone knows about and I just discovered late? Am I out of touch?

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:03]:

No, I don't think so. I've only been once now, but shout out to Dan Whalen, who's the developer over at Intro and spearheaded the construction of that whole building. But Jaja within it is fantastic. I completely agree. And I don't know that it's fully unearthed.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:07:21]:

Yeah. So, okay. It's still a hidden gem then. Yeah, I went to it. Someone recommended it to me. One of the guys is, like, super underground foodie here. It's like, oh, you have to eat here. I'm like, all right. And he won't eat anywhere that has more than, like, 200 Yelp reviews. So that's how I know it's got to be somewhat underground.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:41]:

Very cool. Well, Andrew, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share more about the story. Like I mentioned, I've been really excited to hear more about the work you're doing regardless and it's been a lot of fun to follow along on your journey.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:07:55]:

Yeah, thank you for having me on and excited to keeping everyone apprised and yourself too of what we're building. And hopefully we build a lot of interest here in Cleveland around BloomFilter, not only on the product, but the company and the team as well.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:10]:

If people had anything they wanted to follow up with you about, what would be the best way for them to do so.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:08:16]:

Andrew at BloomFilter app is my email. It's the best way to get a hold of me. I usually respond within a couple of hours, but give me 24, but I respond to all my emails.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:27]:

Amazing. Well, thank you again, really appreciate it.

Andrew Wolfe (Bloomfilter) [01:08:30]:

Awesome. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:33]:

That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey at layoffeland FM or find us on Twitter at @podlayoftheland or at @sternjefe J-E-F-E. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.