Michael Aring’s Post

I find myself returning to the City of London more frequently. Gitpod is becoming the development platform of choice for regulated industries, first and foremost, financial institutions. Here's why: Investment banks, asset managers, and insurance companies all need to get better at shipping digital products. At the core of their ability to ship digital products is their ability to make developers productive. Developers are more productive in an environment where it’s easy to do the right thing and the cognitive load from security restrictions is low. But the truth is: Creating productive development environments that meet their security standards has been anything but easy for these big financial institutions. That is where Gitpod comes in. We give these companies a secure development platform that enables them to ship digital products faster, and at higher quality. The CTO of one of Europe's largest Financial Services companies recently said to me: "I need to turn this company into a FinTech. And Gitpod is part of that journey."

We rethought what Gitpod can be from scratch. Our product is the market leader and growing like crazy. Still, we wanted to think bigger. Here are the 3 reasons why chose to launch a new product. Context - Gitpod enables you to start developing on any project in seconds. - It's loved by 1.5M+ developers across the world - Companies use Gitpod to accelerate their developer productivity while meeting strict security guidelines Here are the 3 reasons why we chose to do more: 1. Self-hosting should be 10x simpler Companies want to self-host Gitpod, but they don’t want the complexity that comes with self-hosting. Our product is already fully managed today. But we believed we could make things 10x simpler. 2. The benefits of the cloud should be available on your laptop Our customers want to run Gitpod in their cloud. They have good reasons: security, control, availability of resources.  But many developers want to try Gitpod without a cloud account. Or they want to work offline. Is there a way to get Gitpod on your local laptop? We believed yes. 3. Automation goes beyond creating dev environments We became popular because we automated the creation and setup of dev environments. But there are still many manual tasks after creating a dev environment. We believed Gitpod could become the central place for automation in the software development lifecycle. For humans and AI agents alike. Imagine what 2024 at Gitpod looked like on the inside: Gitpod is onboarding new enterprise customers at a record pace. We continue to ship new features based on the feedback of our partners (e.g. on Monday we launched an AzureAD integration). Yet, in parallel, our engineering team worked around the clock to build a new version of what development environments can be. Gitpod is buzzing with energy. This week, we’re launching Gitpod Flex. Here's what you get: - Runners: Instead of installing Gitpod in AWS in one day, you can now install it in 3 minutes. - Gitpod Desktop: You can launch Gitpod right on your local machine with our new app. No cloud or internet needed. Yes, this can replace Docker Desktop for you. - Automations: You now have programmable tasks and actions that integrate with your dev environment The opportunities to automate away your work are endless. - Devcontainer.json support: Any project with a devcontainer config can be launched in Gitpod right away. - Zero-trust environments: "Never trust, always verify" built into your development workflows. Because a good security model doesn’t have to create a bad developer experience. It's still Day 1. We have a clear opportunity to build a global technology leader from Europe. You can join us on the journey by trying out Gitpod. Build the products you want to see in the world with Gitpod. Onwards.

BIG LAUNCH COMING UP 🫢

If you make the news with these headlines, it's time to focus on Developer Productivity. It’s a life-and-death battle for these companies. 💀 For almost every company, we perceive the value of their products primarily through their digital experience. And it’s not just VW and Deutsche Bank. Big companies are struggling to deliver. If they don’t make their developers productive, their chances of long-term survival in the market are slim. So, Developer Productivity moves from Engineering Managers to CTOs. The clock is ticking. But what does that mean - make your developers productive? High Developer Productivity means that you can ship digital products at a fast pace and high quality. The ideal state: Frequent updates + few bugs. Sadly, most companies are not in that position. And it hurts their core business. Let’s look at two examples that caused accelerated heart rates in Frankfurt and Wolfsburg. How Postbank shot itself in the foot Last year, Deutsche Bank’s subsidiary Postbank planned to do a major software migration. Unfortunately, it failed in uncontrollable ways and created big headlines: over weeks, thousands of customers could not access their bank accounts. Transfers did not go through. Even ATMs stopped functioning 🫣 The damage: immense. Postbank customers did not walk, they ran, looking for a new bank. How Cariad prevents Audi, Porsche, and VW from launching new models 4 years ago, Volkswagen created Cariad, a 6,500-strong software shop. Its vision: become a major software player in automotive and reduce VW’s dependency on Big Tech from the US. Sadly, Cariad failed in every way. Its inability to ship software caused delays at Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche. New models cannot be launched on time. The problem is still not solved 🫣🫣🫣 The damage: billions of euros. Cariad is undergoing a major restructuring effort that seems like the final straw for VW’s software ambitions. TAKEAWAY We’re in the midst of the greatest transformation of Developer Productivity in the last 20 years. And it’s not because of AI. It is because companies that don’t get their developers productive will simply fail. We work with some of the biggest companies in Europe on Developer Productivity. It's encouraging that CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs make this topic a strategic priority. I am hopeful that VW and Deutsche Bank will turn things around and become software powerhouses. They have to. What do you think? How can big old companies make their developers productive?

Wow, I don't remember an IT outage of this scale: - United, Delta and American Airlines issue global ground stop on ALL flights - Major airports from LAX to BER do now allow take-off - Hospital software across the US is down Apparently, a CrowdStrike software update caused Windows OS to crash globally. Doesn't matter what industry you are in. The resilience of IT systems affects all of us, every day. This is wild...

Recently, I've been getting a lot more inbound messages about interesting roles at startups. What I tell every single one: I am 100% focused on the success of Gitpod. My level of conviction is 10 out of 10. My career started in VC which gave me one unfair advantage: almost unfiltered access to company information at startups across Europe. I saw 1,000+ pitch decks, attended 100s of meetings with founders, and a fair share of board meetings. I spent more time than I care to admit working on financial statements of startups. Most startups are a shit show. Either the opportunity is not big enough or the startup's team is incapable of seizing the opportunity. Building a VC-backed company is very hard! Opportunities like Gitpod are rare, especially, here in Europe. When a billion-dollar market opportunity and a hungry and capable team come together, magic happens. And that is why my conviction is so high. A billion-dollar market is being created around us. Crazy feeling to be in the middle of that. I don't want to miss any of it.

Fascinating chart on software dev job postings over the last 4 years. It's a tough job market out there for software developers... While all of this remains true: 1: Every company wants to become more digital, not less 2: Software development is a more important capability for companies than ever before - often, a strategic differentiator (think, automotive). 3: The pressure on development teams is only increasing. So what's behind this trend: Overhiring? Inefficient teams? CFOs scrambling for budget cuts? Talking to CTOs, I see a little bit of it all.

The biggest awareness/execution gap in B2B marketing today: 9 out of 10 companies don't invest in owning their audience 🚩 Everyone is aware, but almost no one shifts their budgets. If we project social media 10+ years in the future… - Earning big political role (of course) - Taking a c-level position in a company - But even: Launching a new product as a founder …will be close to impossible without a personal social media brand. Not impossible. Just a lot harder. #1 Build direct reach or have no reach at all - We don’t want to read from companies, we want to read real stories from real people. Social media is where the attention is. Everyone spends too much time on LinkedIn and X. - The role of traditional media in amplifying company messaging will go close to zero. PR agencies are already seeing a historic loss of power. We get inbound from PR agencies all the time and we could not care less. - If you don’t build personal reach, you won’t have any reach. #2 A social media brand will be the new PhD Norms like these change over time. Take PhDs: Back in the day, PhDs were considered a must-have for a lot of c-level positions (in Germany, that is). It wasn’t impossible to become an executive without a PhD. Just a lot harder. Today, in most fields PhDs don’t matter at all. #3 Distribution co-founders will become the norm In the first step, people with large follower counts made money from paid sponsorships. Now, Instagram stars build their own beauty & FMCG brands to capture more value. But this is mostly in consumer tech. Next, B2B companies will be founded with a distribution co-founder. What is a distribution co-founder? - Speaks the language of the ICP - Has a large + trusting follower base - Acts as a standalone marketing channel to generate demand for millions of revenue Why not just build a company brand? - Consumer and B2B are converging. People want to read about people. - Even large brands get nearly no reach on social media. Love or hate it, the game has shifted (but marketing dollars have mostly not).

"Just canceled my Canva subscription". The cringe show from Canva Create is a stroke of genius. In general, B2B software marketing is extremely boring. Most conference booths look the same, and so do most landing pages. SSO, APIs, integrations... Enterprise buyers care about this, but who else does? 🥱 B2B marketing is easily forgotten. But this video sticks, whether you like it or not. And it takes guts to pull it off. Canva chose to embrace the cringe. The show happened in person, but it's made for the internet. Canva's reward: millions of views, reshares, and posts like this one. For a boring enterprise software product. The ROI on this video production will be huge. Traditional B2B marketing loses out in the competition for attention. If you are not producing your offline event for an online audience, you're doing it wrong.

How can DeepL be valued at $2B when Chat-GPT translates texts for me? Because Chat-GPT is not optimized for the Enterprise - and likely never will be. Enterprise contracts are where the money is at. Take a look at source code management: GitHub (owned by Microsoft) dominates in terms of developer adoption with over 100 million users. But GitLab still makes a fine living as number 2, bringing in over $160 million in revenues per year and growing over 30% yoy. Most security-conscious CTOs I talk to prefer GitLab. DeepL does at least two things well that warrant a premium for enterprise customers: [1] Focus on Security and Privacy [2] Business-specific AI models for enterprise use cases (e.g. lawyers) Building a billion-dollar enterprise business in the shadow of a consumer-focused incumbent from the US is a great opportunity for European founders. GitLab and DeepL are two successful examples. I am very excited about the global success of DeepL. It is now the largest technology company in my hometown Cologne, just 7 years after being founded. Goes to show the potential of building VC-funded tech companies out of Europe 🇪🇺