ModernCTO Podcast Recap

In this episode of the ModernCTO podcast, Joel Beasley talks to Tommy, co-founder and CEO of Release. They discuss how Tommy founded Release to solve the huge problem of quickly spinning up environments, why the best entrepreneurs are always extremely persistent, and why being vulnerable goes a long way as a leader. Tommy: I know how it is to be an entrepreneur. I know the journey you've been through a bit. 

I guess we have some glutton for punishment or something. I don't know what it is. I just think about going to work for someone else, and I just can't make myself. I mean, I did. I've done it.

I was the CTO at True Car before this. After a company I started got acquired, the whole time I was there, I could just not get it out of my head that I wanted to do it again. So, there's something about it. That's exciting and freeing. Scary, but I don't know. That's what makes me tick is just going out there and trying to do something crazy. Joel: Absolutely. And I love what you guys are doing with Release because you know, my background, like I said, I was a software developer for 17 years. I understand environments and all of that. And when I saw what you guys were doing, I think it was like a month or two ago, I was like, legitimately, this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.

So I was hoping you could just explain what Release is, what it does.  Tommy: Yeah. So Release is environments as a service. Environments are needed for developers, for everything from developing their code, testing, and QA. Running it for their customers. Obviously your production environment is where the customer sees the end result of your work.

In modern software delivery, there's all sorts of new delivery mechanisms where you might have a customer who comes to you and says, I don't want to have my data co-mingled with all of your other customers in a multi-tenant kind of environment. 

So, I would rather have a version of what you're selling me, isolated to myself, a single tenant version of that. Sometimes, our customers host those for their customers, like a direct single tenant environment. Sometimes they deliver those into their cloud accounts. So, they're kind of like an enterprise version of their applications. And so, environments are just kind of like this absolutely necessary fundamental part of the software ecosystem.

Development, all the way through to getting your ideas in front of your customers. They're just really hard. They've always been really hard. Release makes it really easy to spin up and down environments on demand. 

So, you know, as the CTO of a public company for a, for a handful of years and got to see, you know, what does it take to run a large engineering organization and make them effective and efficient and environments were a really difficult problem to solve, especially when you get to a larger scale company where the applications get really complicated.

It's not just a rails app and that's all you're running or a JS app. It's got data pipelines, it's got ETL that needs to happen. It's got, you know, lots of different applications, internal and external. Then, you have big teams of engineers trying to collaborate and they all tend to bottleneck around.

Well, I got to use the staging environment or QA is being used by this team. And so I've got to wait. I really, really felt the pain in trying to get an engineering organization efficient and environments were kind of a headache there. So, me and my co-founders decided we were going to start a company to solve that problem because nothing really existed in the market.

Listen to the full episode here.