How Two Ex-Uber Engineers Built a Unicorn in Less Than 3 Years with Martin Mao: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by HighLevel, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. And on today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how two ex-Uber engineers built a unicorn in less than three years. And to drop these value bombs, I brought to Martin Mayo and EO Fire Studios. Martin is the founder and CEO of Chronosphere. He previously held roles at leading tech companies such as Uber, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. And today we talk about how luck and timing play a big role in success, how more industries are adopting new technology, creating demand for better solutions, and how to be ready for opportunities, study trends, and position yourself to act, and oh, so much more.

0:38John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sparsing today's episode goes to Martin and our sponsors. Fire Nation, is your business stuck? Join Eric Trump and Clay Clark at America's highest rated business conference, November 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Learn the proven systems used to create thousands of success stories today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Stop duct taping your business together. High level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30 day free trial.

1:15John Lee Dumas:Plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com highlevelfire.com. Martin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Thanks, John. Hello, Fire Nation. Great to be here and chat with you today. The thing that I would say perhaps most people disagree with, I'm sure this is mentioned a lot, is that obviously to be successful, luck plays some role in it. I would say that my point of view is that luck probably plays a majority role. in the outcome of success versus not.

2:01For us here at Chronosphere and for myself, you know, we have a fantastic team and we have a great product. However, for us, it was really an opportunity in the broader industry that we had no control in that really created, I would say, an opportunity for us to disrupt the market. And when these opportunities come along, you have to be ready, you have to have the right product and the right team to go disrupt it for sure. However, without that piece of luck and that timing, which was outside of our control, even if you have the best product or the best team, you can't really, I don't think that guarantees success.

2:36So that would perhaps be my thing is that luck has an overriding factor to play in success.

2:44John Lee Dumas:But listen, one way to look at it as well is luck is where effort meets opportunity. And the reality is if you, Fire Nation, keep putting in the effort, opportunities will arise for you to be quote unquote lucky for sure. And that's why we're talking today about how two ex Uber engineers built a unicorn in less than three years. And Martin, you built an observability platform at Uber. What the heck is that? And what did you learn from that experience? Yeah, it's a great question. So an observability platform is really a tool set that companies use and businesses use to really gain visibility and insight into their business.

3:25And this is all the way up and down their technology stack. So you can imagine gaining insight into how your infrastructure is running, the machine and the hardware that your product or services run on, what's happening in that infrastructure to all of the applications that a business would use. So you can imagine, you know, at Uber, while there was an app that consumers would use, You can imagine on the back end, there was a lot of software and applications that would have to function to make sure that the app would work for the end consumer. So visibility and insights into all of those applications that a business is running in order to provide a product and service.

4:04And actually, perhaps most importantly, also visibility and insight into a business as well. So at Uber, this would be things like tracking the number of drivers online for a particular city and a particular product and, you know, what the demand looks like and having that visibility in real time and making sort of real time business decisions out of that data. Generally, what we have found gives companies and businesses a competitive advantage over their competitors. So observability is really the tooling that captures and stores all of that data and then provides the visualizations and the analysis and the insights back to the business.

4:45And that was the type of technology that we had built internally at Uber to help them do exactly that. And that's the type of technology that we now provide to the rest of the companies around the world here at Chronosphere.

4:58John Lee Dumas:Now, this might be a silly question, but have you seen the docudrama Super Pumped? uh, I, I have actually not, um, I've read the book and, and, um, I, um, I, I've had a lot of friends tell me about it. I haven't actually watched it myself, but it is, it is on my list. Yeah. I'm shocked because it's so well done. The actors are great in it. And I was just going to follow up that with the question of, you know, how realistic was super pumped. Yeah. You know, there was definitely, um, so I read the, the book and I would say, um, you know, I joined in early 2015, so somewhat early on in the journey there.

5:39And I would say that definitely a lot of events in the book were based on real events. I think perhaps, and again, I haven't watched it, but perhaps the TV series is a little bit dramatized. But yeah, there's definitely some truth there, I would say.

5:56John Lee Dumas:What was the aha moment of Chronosphere? Walk us through that. You know, you can imagine, as I described earlier, we were really building the observability tooling for Uber itself. So we saw the benefits that the company Uber was getting out of this. One of the decisions we made pretty early on in building that was that we actually decided to open source a big portion of that technology, thus that the rest of the community could benefit off of what we were building at Uber. And what we were finding was that not only was Uber benefiting off of this type of technology, more and more companies out there were doing the same.

6:38And the big aha moment was actually probably around late 2018 when for us and early on when we were talking about luck, the industry really shifted and the industry decided to really adopt the type of technology stack that the tech giants like an Uber or Google were already running for years. is the rest of the industry was really interested in adopting a very similar technology stack to them. And we had just built this, you can imagine, built this tool set for this particular technology stack. So it was an aha moment of, oh, wait, we just by pure chance and luck built the ideal solution to a problem that we didn't think was very widespread.

7:23And the industry shifted in this direction. And it was going to become a much broader problem that most companies in the industry would have to go and tackle. And we just had the ideal solution. So that was the aha moment to think that, hey, we should really do something about this. And many more companies around the world could really benefit from this type of tech.

7:43John Lee Dumas:As if a startup isn't hard enough. I mean, now we get to throw a pandemic into the middle of everything. So what was building Chronosphere like during a pandemic? Yeah, definitely, I would say, threw a wrench into a lot of our plans, for sure. Or, you know, when the company started, we actually were very intentional about designing the organization. We were distributed from the beginning. We weren't remote. So we had three offices, one in Seattle, where I'm at, one in New York, where my co-founder is at. And we have a European office as well. And a lot of thought went into designing the organization and where folks would be in these offices.

8:26and the fact that each of our projects would be spread across two physical locations and, you know, a lot of, yeah, again, thought that went to that. And then sort of pandemic hit and threw a wrench into everything. And, you know, we went completely remote and sort of have grown from that point in time. I think we had about 12 employees when the pandemic started, and now we're over 200. So the whole growth has really been remote first, which was not part of our original plans. But I think as a growing startup, it may actually be easier to deal with the pandemic because you can imagine for us, we've never known what an in-person office culture is like, at least here at Chronosphere.

9:07So we didn't have to sort of adjust to something and then attempt to adjust back to the norm. We've only known one norm for our lifetime, which was, you know, sort of everybody being remote and distributed.

9:18John Lee Dumas:Now, you have a lot of customers that a lot of people have heard of, like DoorDash and Robinhood and Kudo and others. Let's talk about your avatar. Like when you started off, who did you really identify as the perfect customer for the solution that you were providing? Where did that start? When we started, we sort of modeled off of the types of companies that we had already solved this problem for. So we originally created the solution at Uber. And the other companies that were using our open source software were of similar size and scale. So you can imagine we were finding that a lot of companies at very large scale were benefiting off of this type of technology.

10:04But not just that, the very sort of technology forward companies seem to be a better fit. So that sort of molded the type of companies we're going after at the beginning. So you can imagine coming from Uber, DoorDash was a natural, very similar and in fact competitive company there that we were going after. It seemed like that was the best fit for our type of product and value proposition. And these types of companies still are today. However, you can imagine it was a little bit daunting as a startup with very few employees trying to sell to very large enterprise accounts there. But we managed to do that successfully and we've continued to do that since then.

10:48John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we're going to talk about differentiating ourselves. We're going to talk about unique selling propositions when we get back from thinking our sponsors. Fire Nation, is your business stuck? Join Eric Trump at America's highest rated business conference, November 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Discover the success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories. See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you, who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee.

11:25John Lee Dumas:Yes, it's month to month and costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. schedule your free personal 13 point assessment with clay clark himself today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire because clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference you will interact with clay directly see thousands of real success stories and learn about attending the thrive time show today in-person workshops featuring football star and entrepreneur tim tebow and president trump's son eric trump today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Become the next success story.

11:57John Lee Dumas:Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting. Everything works together seamlessly.

12:30John Lee Dumas:Plus award-winning 24-7 support so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack, a 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 50-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something execution roadmap, and more. Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Martin, we're back and let's be honest. If we're going to win in today's environment, we have to differentiate ourselves.

13:10John Lee Dumas:What exactly did you do at Chronosphere to stand out against your competitors? Yeah, I think for us at Chronosphere, and this really stemmed from the underlying technology that we had built already and what was happening in the industry, we sort of realized that our technology and our solution was better suited for the technology stack. And I keep mentioning this technology stack, but it's essentially, you know, if you hear that a lot of companies are not just moving to the cloud, but also sort of containerizing all of their applications and running on container-based infrastructure. It was that type of shift that, A, we went through at Uber many years ago, and B, the rest of the industry is going through now.

13:54It was realizing that that shift was happening to the broader industry and really creating the ideal solution for this new environment. So you can imagine we weren't trying to create a better solution for the existing environment because many solutions already existed and there were a lot of incumbents there. But what we realized was that everybody was changing their architecture to this brand new type of architecture and environment and that we had already built a better solution there. So it was really sort of focused on continuing to build and double down on a better solution for this new environment where, you know, the legacy incumbent solutions could not really compete because they were not really optimized for such and really doubling down our efforts there.

14:45I would say we're also perhaps lucky that very early on, our solution was both more scalable but also more cost-efficient than a lot of our competitors out there. And I would say for the first couple of years of the company, being more cost-efficient was good, but perhaps that wasn't the thing top of mind for a lot of companies out there in the industry. However, you can imagine in the more recent macroeconomic environment, cost is quickly rising to almost the number one thing. And running a more efficient business is almost becoming a number one thing there. So you can imagine having better unit economics than a lot of our competitors is also becoming a pretty big differentiator, especially now.

15:32John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, I hope you're taking mental note here on the ways that Martin differentiated Kronos Veer and how he was able to pull ahead of the competition and stand out and do all those things and apply that to your business. What are the different ways that you can differentiate from your competitors so that you can stand out and make things happen? And if we could get real concise for a minute here, Martin, what's your number one unique selling proposition? If I had to really nail you down and just say, what's the one thing that really makes you special? Tell us that and then how you identified it.

16:07Yeah, so the one thing is, and we'll get pretty technical here, I guess. The one thing is that we found a pattern in the industry that the amount of, and I described what an observability tool and platform does earlier, the amount of data produced to feed into these systems is growing at an exponential pace. And you can imagine the cost associated with these systems is directly correlated with the amount of data produced. So what was happening was that as our systems are getting more and more complex, more and more data gets produced and these things cost end up costing a lot more and that was just a pattern that we had both identified from from previous companies but also we were seeing really impact the industry so our number one differentiator there is not just making the unit economics cheaper but really providing a feature set and a tool set that allows our customers to control that growth of data and and so so you can imagine you know the conversation we're having is your data is growing 3x year on year.

17:09And while the Chronosphere solution is cheaper for the same amount of data, you can imagine if you're growing 3x year on year, in two years from now, you're going to have 10x the amount of data. And no matter how cheap you can make your solution, within a few years, you're right back to the same spot. So it's less about purely the unit economics, which is great for now, but it's actually allowing our customers to control all that growth of data and really map the data they're producing to the value they're getting out of the system. And that has been a pretty big and fairly distinct way of thinking about the problem from our competitors in the past.

17:48And that's something that a lot of our customers really value about us.

17:52John Lee Dumas:Now, I know you did say that you were about to get pretty technical, and I'm okay with that because I want to stay here for a minute and get down to the nuts and the bolt? Because I really want to understand the real difference in observability versus technologies like monitoring and application performance monitoring. What is the real difference there? Going back to the feature set that I talked about, then I'll talk to your point about comparing it to some of the other tools that you mentioned. And this may be a general theme as well. When you have data, often what we find is that when people produce the data, they don't think about the usage of it.

18:28They don't think about the value they get out of the data. They treat every piece of data in exactly the same way, and it costs them perhaps the exact same amount of money. But you can imagine different sets of your data. So if this data is used for the infrastructure or used for the business, it provides a different value to the business. And treating all of the data uniformly when the data provides different value is perhaps not the best idea. So being able to assign different value to subsets of your data based on and pay different costs based on the value that you get out of it aligns that a lot more for companies out there.

19:06And more specifically in the observability space, you know, you can imagine this is things like tweaking the how long you store the data for, the level of detail you store it at, et cetera there. When comparing to perhaps other, you know, you can imagine the thing that we're trying to provide insights and visibility. This is something that has existed as long as software has existed. You've always needed to have that visibility. What's different these days and why you maybe need an observability tool versus an application performance monitoring tool is that along with this architecture change and sort of getting using more container based technologies, What ends up happening is that your technology stack becomes far more complex than it has been before.

19:52And I would say that the tooling that exists in the market today is built and optimized for a much simpler architecture than what most companies are producing today. So you can imagine when you change that, you have the same needs, but your requirements change and you need something that can actually handle the complexity of your new environment. And this is where, you know, observability tooling like Chronosphere allows you to sort of regain that visibility that you've always needed and you maybe used to have in your old architecture. And now you've potentially lost as you've shifted over.

20:31John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, I hope you're taking inspiration from this journey. I mean, here's somebody who was working at Uber, got a lot of skill sets, got a lot of expertise in a certain area, saw a problem in the marketplace, saw a void, saw an underserved need, and went to fill it better than anybody else. How can you do that in your specific example of your life, whether that be something you're passionate about, excited about, skill set, expertise, whatever that might be? How can you create a similar journey in your progress, in your life? And Martin, on that note that I just shared, what would you want the biggest takeaway to be from everything we talked about here today for our listeners, Fire Nation?

21:12You said it there, right? And you said it at the beginning where, you know, you want to be ready when the opportunity presents itself. So I think sort of trying to perhaps take a step back and look at larger trends in the economy, in the world, in the industries that you are in, and attempting to look for opportunities when they arise, and being ready to capitalize on these opportunities. Because, you know, you both, you need both sides of that equation, you need the opportunity to arise, and then you need the execution to be ready to execute when it does, and probably be ready to execute pretty quickly on it.

21:51So, you know, for me at Chronosphere, that was a sort of how we ended up sort of capitalizing on the opportunity we had in front of us.

22:00John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, I really hope you're seeing the inspiration, the opportunities here from somebody like Martin, who's done something really cool with the knowledge and experience that he's gained over the years in creating something pretty darn amazing. Martin, how do you want our listeners to connect with you, to stay up with what you have going on, any call to action you have for us and then we'll say goodbye. Yeah, for sure. I'm actually not super active on social media, but LinkedIn is probably where I am the most active. So, you know, I would say if anybody would like to connect, please feel free to find me on LinkedIn.

22:36We'd love to sort of have a chat there. If in particular there are any folks out there that I would say are going through this type of architecture transition, always happy to help with those as well. Perhaps going to our website, chronosphere.io is the best way to go do that. But yeah, always happy to connect with like-minded folks and sort of chat and provide any advice or just sort of bounce ideas off each other whenever possible.

23:06John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, if you have ideas percolating in areas similar to this that you know Martin's been there, done that. He could really help you. And he's offering to connect with you. I mean, take advantage of these opportunities because that's an amazing opportunity to take advantage of because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with MM and JLD today. So keep up the heat. Head over to eofire.com. Type Martin in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with links to everything we've talked about here today. chronosphere.io, etc. Martin, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth with Fire Nation today.