Over the last 15 years of my career, I’ve had the joy of building software, teams, and businesses at every scale and stage of maturity. In 2015, I founded Fleetsmith with the mission to help IT teams automate the employee lifecycle. We became a mission critical product in the IT stack for companies like Robinhood, Monzo, and HackerOne, which eventually led us to be acquired by Apple in 2020. On this journey, I’ve realized that the most innovative organizations have the fewest unnecessary barriers standing between their developers and the ability to write and ship code. Here’s what I’ve learned: You’re probably asking your engineers to do too much, and it’s killing your innovation.
Far too often, I see companies invest significant capital to attract the world’s best specialized talent, only to ask them to do things they aren’t well-equipped to do—at the expense of precious time delivering value to their business and its customers. Spending six months to hire a coveted JavaScript engineer, just to have them build CI pipelines and deploy their own Docker containers, is an excellent strategy to achieve mediocrity.
This isn’t a novel problem, and some of the best engineering organizations in the industry have looked to improving the developer experience as the solution, with internal platforms at the center of the DevEx zeitgeist. The thesis is simple: offer your engineers a single platform that abstracts away the complex, but important, network of tasks involved in the delivery and operation of software, and they’ll have more time to focus on innovation and quality.
That sounds easy enough, but since leaving Apple, I’ve talked to countless teams only to find that many are six months (or more!) into their journey of building their developer platform. And while some of these organizations may be well-equipped to deliver a sufficient solution, many others are finding themselves with an expensive and complex setup that product engineers refuse to adopt. And all of them, even the most advanced organizations, end up spending years with entire specialized teams to build and maintain their platforms, using resources that could have been spent on other critical business needs. As engineers, we believe we can do anything—but organizations who can deftly navigate when to build, and when to buy, are the ones that will consistently yield innovation.
That’s why we founded Tempest. Our goal is to deliver a scalable enterprise-grade developer platform that feels easy-to-use and easy-to-adopt for your product engineering teams, and won’t take three years and millions of dollars to build. We want to make a delightful developer experience a broadly accessible commodity.
We’re really excited to show you what we’ve been up to.
Sign up for our waitlist for early access to try out our product.
