[_Marak_]

Congratulations to Austen and Serverless Inc. for raising an additional 10m dollars. From what I've seen they are all very nice people over at Serverless.

I've been running a small service similar to their new "Serverless Platform" for some time and was approached by them in 2014 to see about joining their team.

Ultimately I ended up deciding not to join because I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in their leadership to make a good product. The next couple of years should be interesting to watch if they can actually build a profitable product.

[nodesocket]

> I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in theit leadership to make a good product

That seems like a strange requirement. Ultimately for a business to be successful there has to be people that know business, marketing, and slaes. If the leadership team is all hard-core tech engineers, there will be a lack of all of the other social and fundamental business skills needed.

[spamizbad]

I think it’s perfectly reasonable given their domain. If you’re in a technology-frontiering business, of which serverless most certainly qualifies for, you need management that’s going to support engineering through the litany of challenges they will face. I’ve seen founders get cold feet and cut corners or pivot away from things when the engineering side seems daunting.

The other side here is your customers are likely engineers themselves. You need to build products that connect with them and genuinely make their lives easier... if your leadership is too far removed from that you’ll end up with a product platform shapes via a game telephone...

With that said, some strong hires early on can make a real difference here.

[drchickensalad]

Not the OP, but they only said it wasn't strong enough, not exclusively engineers. I see plenty of grey area here.