IVP's Hypergrowth Podcast: CircleCI CEO Jim Rose on the rise of software delivery as a competitive differentiator and what it's like hitting the stride of hypergrowth

16/09/2020

In IVP's Hypergrowth Podcast series, IVP investors talk with CEOs from the fastest growing companies to understand the ins and outs of company building in the hypergrowth environment.

CircleCI is celebrating its nine-year anniversary today and CEO Jim Rose is on a mission to shorten the time from idea to value delivery. In this hypergrowth podcast episode, IVP's Cack Wilhelm talks with Jim about the rise of software delivery as a competitive differentiator and what it is like achieving hypergrowth and adjusting the organization. Few businesses are immune from the need for quality software development and deployment. Building quality software and shipping quickly has become a core engine of value creation in companies across all industries.

CircleCI allows teams to rapidly release code they trust by automating the build, test, and delivery process for both mobile and web apps, either in the cloud or on their own private server. Thousands of leading companies, including BuzzFeed, Coinbase, Facebook, Ford Motor Company, Lyft, PagerDuty, Samsung, Spotify, and Stitch Fix rely on CircleCI to accelerate delivery and improve quality.

IVP led the Series E for CircleCI in April 2020, with IVP's Cack Wilhelm currently serving on the company's board.

Some key takeaways from Jim:

FROM FOUNDER TO CEO THROUGH PRODUCT PIVOT The challenge when you are a seed series or series A company is typically one around product and technology. But eventually, as you grow through that phase, the challenge starts to move from building the technology to building the company.

CircleCI's founders built new and efficient products to solve software delivery needs beginning in the early 2010s. As the decade progressed, so too did the desires of consumers and companies. Thus, CircleCi's in-house engineers had to iterate to consumer's shifting wants by building and deploying products through increasingly organized and expedited software delivery. This allowed the company to innovate its own product simultaneously from the inside out - benefitting the whole ecosystem. Through CircleCI's nine years in business, they've continuously found ways to ship. As any startup grows, the realities of evolving product market fit come into play and with that leadership decisions for long-term hypergrowth.

SOFTWARE DELIVERY AS A COMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATOR The market has definitely woken up to the competitive differentiator that software provides and being a well-oiled software delivery machine, what that creates for a company is really important.

So, in the same way that companies, if you're in retail, have really thought about store design and have thought about experience and brand, you have to apply that same rigor to how you think about building software.

Over the past decade, the world of technology has significantly iterated, especially in the way that startups must ship product and thus deliver software to their customers. With the pace and precedent set by the big tech companies in 2011 and 2012, the process of software delivery, led by companies like CircleCI, has helped keep pace with the industry and consumer demand. What's more is in the last year, the effects of the pandemic have accelerated how software delivery needs to be done given the world's newly remote nature - affecting processes in the ecosystem as a whole.

AVOID PITFALLS BY ADJUSTING THE ORGANIZATION TO ACHIEVE HYPERGROWTH When you get to this phase of growth, what you're doing is you're building the organization that hires the people, that creates the context and the tooling so that other people can do the job.

There's a window where you have an opportunity to make those changes and do so in a way that's expensive and difficult, but not incredibly expensive.

There's a moment in time when all the mundane becomes strategic . In many companies moving from seed rounds to A or B rounds, processes like hiring explode and become part of the growth and strategy versus just a natural requirement to grow. Each role - from marketing to engineering to sales - all become hiring engines with a vested interest in the company, allowing startups to grow exponentially, and sometimes inexpensively, if the employees act as brand ambassadors. The same philosophy of adjusting to the organizational need rings true for automating processes from the beginning to save time later. If done correctly in the beginning - when the world shifts significantly or quickly companies can adapt.

More from the full conversation in the transcript is below.

To hear more, listen on iTunes or SoundCloud.

TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Welcome to IVP's Hypergrowth Podcast. In this series, we talk with CEOs of the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of company building in the hypergrowth environment. If you like what you hear, consider following us on SoundCloud or subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

Cack Wilhelm: Today my guest is Jim Rose, the CEO of CircleCI. We're catching up after the recent hundred-million-dollar series E funding round that IVP is very proud to have led, and a company where I'm also on the board of directors. CircleCI is a powerful software delivery platform that automates the complexity of building, testing, and deploying software, allowing teams to deliver value quickly and at scale. This might sound niche when software is eating the world the way that it is today. CircleCI really brings automation, consistency, speed, and reliability to the craft of software creation and their customers, illustrious names like Facebook, Ford, Spotify, Lyft and PagerDuty all have a huge competitive advantage because of this best in class continuous integration and delivery service that CircleCI provides. In this episode, we'll discuss why devops is t

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