Rebranding and Leadership Expansion with StackGen’s Sachin Aggarwal

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone, welcome back here to techron tv. I'm thrilled to have an old friend come.

Well, he's not old, but I've known him a while now. He's a friend of mine. Come back on our show.

He is, in my mind, the very definition of a serial entrepreneur. He is said, well, I'm gonna let him tell you about all his different startups and exits, but we're really here to talk about his newest one, which is recently, uh, had some exciting news at a rebrand. Let me introduce you to Sasha and Agarwal.

Sasha is now the co-founder at CEO of Stack Gen. You may have heard of them. We covered their initial launch, launch under the name of app cd.

But anyway, Sashen, it's great to have you on. I, I, I realize you just got off the plane from India. I appreciate you jumping on with us.

Uh, for those not familiar with you, give them a little bit of your serial entrepreneur history. Sure, sure. I I know we spoke few times on your show about it, but firstly, good morning.

Happy Monday to everybody here and, uh, uh, always nice to be back on this show. So, uh, a little bit about myself, if, if it helps you, uh, listeners, uh, this is actually my seventh startup as an entrepreneur. Uh, everything in tech, um, uh, last three startups were in cloud security, uh, cloud space.

Um, um, and, uh, we are just talking about my, uh, we had a company in container security called Layer Inside that in 20 16 20 17, we built, sold to CO in 2018, still early days for container security. So we were really one of the first ones to see where, you know, why people should think about security in a different way in a containerized world. Um, our last startup was in securing infrastructure as code and shift left CSPM, again, a market, uh, leader, a company called a qx, which was sold to co tenable, uh, three years back.

And pretty much what I'm building at Stack Gen, which was previously known as app cd, and we'll talk about why we changed the name. Uh, and we announced that on September 10th. Uh, but what we are really building is learning from, of course, my prior journeys and understanding the pain points that the, the security of the SecOps folks have, the challenges in the DevOps processes.

And I, I think the, the, the real solution lies in not really having a piecemeal approach to dev developers, DevOps, and SecOps. I think the idea is because really security should not be an afterthought. Um, and we have, we have talked about it since last six, seven years of, you know, shifting security left and everything, making security built in, into the process, but we never achieved it in two sense, right?

And when I say that is okay, we can keep shifting security left, but all it meant is that we're scanning or we are running security tools early on in the, in the process, in the CSCD process, right? When I'm saying truly built in is the manifest that we create is, and using some generative AI technologies, using some learnings, using some our own, uh, algorithms, is to make sure that we are incorporating those security principles of the governance principle into the manifest that then gets delivered. So it's not really an after effect scanning.

And, and shifting the scanning concept is basically saying that, uh, if you really wanna scale, if you wanna really do governance at, um, uh, at scale and run at your innovation speed, then you should not be really doing the ticket ops and manual, you know, processes of remediation after the fact, right? Um, doesn't matter which, what part of pipeline you're running that, whether it's at, at the cloud or whether it's shifting it left, right? So that was a thesis of app cd and, and I think that should tell you why we changed the name, because as we started engaging with our early customers, early adopters, it became pretty evident that people start thinking, okay, cd, are you really, um, uh, a Jenkins replacement or, you know, you building a CD solution.

Uh, even though for US App CD meant, uh, app cloud deployment, uh, um, but when we started looking at the scope of the problem that we're solving and the vastness and the opportunity presented to us, uh, two things we very clear. One is that infrastructure as code is an old way of doing things. So people should think about rethink, about infrastructure generation form code.

And when I say form code from application code, and secondly, it's, it's a full stack approach, right? It's not a piecemeal approach of, you know, just Kubernetes or serverless. You know, people have multiple compute requirements these days, multi-cloud requirements.

So you have to think of it as a full stack solution with, of co generative ai, right? I mean, you are building a company in 2024, um, you know, you have to start thinking AI first, right? So, so I think that was a reason, and I think Stack Gen or Surprise was available to us for use.

Uh, it's, I think it fits in pretty appropriately what we are building. So to think of us as a full, full stack solution with, with, with generative ai, generative Ai. Yeah.

And that was done. I love it. Yeah.

You know, you conveniently left Anto that with the name changing guys also announced the closing of a, uh, over $12 million seed round, not a, not an a, a seed. So what we announced in March was we had some early believers, my prior investors, um, you know, insiders who, um, gave us a safe note, um, and we had not valued the company. Then, uh, what happened at the back of it, back of our customer traction and our initial success, there was a lot of inbound interest.

Uh, so as I was talking to a few of the investors, um, we, our insiders basically came together pretty quick. So we closed our seed round, the official seed round in, in actually few months back. We just announced it, uh, this month, but it was closed, uh, in June, actually.

3 million seed on, I mean, the reason, it's a odd number because obviously of the ProNet and everything, but, um, Well, when you're dealing with insiders and family and friends and priors, you know, people put in what they want, what they could afford, and yeah, they, it comes out to those kinds of things. But I, I gotta assume this was done and you, as you mentioned back in June, to be on the heels or, or to proceed, uh, a formal, uh, love, uh, uh, an a round, you know, your first round of true investment. So we had a couple of options.

Yeah, the founder, we always have options that, you know, we, we always already had $600 in our bank, and, um, so we could have just used our initial safe round, build a company more, and then done a c series A either later this year or, or early next year. Um, like I said, there was a lot of interest, uh, for, from few investors. And, um, we thought that it'll be since, since we we're really building a pretty large platform, which is at the intersection of developers, DevOps and SecOps, um, raising additional capital will talk sort of de-risk given as an election year, um, given, you know, we're still uncertain about the, the, the macroeconomic, not, not what we are doing as a company, but, but in general, uh, what's happening in the world.

Um, and, uh, also helps our ability to scale faster and quicker and experiment more, bring in more qualified leadership team, convince talent. So overall, I think it was a pretty good strategy for the company. And like I said, we didn't spend too much time.

It was done in three weeks from start to finish, um, and, uh, now it's a proper funded get seed round. We have a board that has been established with our investors, so we have a governance in place. Yeah, I think it sets up very nicely, um, for our series A, which may happen now in the middle of next year or towards the end of next year.

And, uh, you know, I'm sure we will again be talking then, Of course, but, you know, but it, but it goes to look, from where I sit now in this stage of my life, right? I talk to entrepreneurs and founders every day, a bunch of them. And it's great to always hear the enthusiasm of a first time entrepreneur, especially one who's just raised maybe their first round of money, right?

Because raising that first money is always the hardest thing. If you've never raised money before, it's hard. But once you've raised it, it becomes progressively easier because you know kinda what's involved.

And, um, and also when people know you've raised money before, it seems that they're more willing to, you know, work with you. However, having a team, and it's not just you Sasha, right? You have a team of people that you've been involved with on several, more than several of these seven startups that you've done.

These kind, the, the way you're talking about it, so matter of factly is not so matter of factly to people who have done it on doing it for the first time, right? And, and so you, I always like to say we save a lot of idiot taxes, right? For making silly mistakes with mistakes that if you've done it before, you know, and, and you cut off and you don't make them again.

Um, so that's all fine. Great. Now you've got money we're going to market.

You said you had some customer traction, but generally at this point, and I know how you work, right? We'll, we'll start seeing some customer announcements, customer wins, maybe some market date or some market research on the problems that Stack Gen is, is, you know, addressing and, and how, and how you're addressing it. But I, I'd like to throw something else at you, and that's the whole gen AI thing, right?

I agree with you. Everything today is Gen ai. We can't stop talking about it here, no matter how much I try, right?

Um, but a lot of people are now starting to say, well, it's not going as fast as we thought, or, it, it's not quite there yet, right? We, we've heard this me, I I think it's because people had inflated, Uh, ideas of what it could do. I think it does everything it says it's gonna do, it's gonna do more.

But what about in, in this business case, in this scenario, is, is Gen i, gen ai, everything you need it to be today? If not, what are you, what are you waiting for? Actually, on the contrary, it is not, uh, you know, I say, um, uh, that the, the name of Giant Stack Giant represents, uh, full stack solution with, with, with a generative ai.

Um, the, the fact of the matter is that, um, we have tried, we, and we try pretty much every two months to see how the models are evolving. And, um, it hallucinates, uh, it does not give us consistent results. Plus, uh, customers are not very, that I think they're taking a step back and understand or understand what, what their AI strategy looks like overall.

It also costs money running the models, so it's just not your license price. Um, so, uh, uh, right now the VR solution is because the infrastructure has to be absolutely deterministic, and that you have to be absolutely sure that this is a right configuration for your network, for your in, you know, your ingress, ingress balls and everything. Um, we are actually doing a deep static code analysis of your source code, right?

I think we're the only ones, and I think Gartner released its own hype cycle now on infrastructure from code. And we are very happy to be part of that. Um, it's sort of validating our thesis that, that, you know, uh, there's, there's not an evolution of, uh, generating your infrastructure from application code or merging of infrastructure and application code, which, whichever way you wanna call it, it.

Um, but it is, uh, we are not, we are not really using gene ai. Like, you know, I, I, I say that, that a name contains that, but only because I think as you're thinking of building solution, you need to keep thinking of where you can leverage the goodness of the AI models, the l lms, so they can give you a first cut, um, you know, get, you get, you get your good head start and a good, good starting point. But if you think of the infrastructure being deterministic, you need to do more.

And what I say, what I mean by that is we are actually doing a deep, um, code analysis is actually a, a study code analysis. We are going through each line of code in a source code in Java, Python, or language, trying to understand what the intent of the delivery is. Is it making a recall feedback call, you know, um, trying to get a, some sense of what their, uh, application requirements are and how should, how should they be provisioned onto a cloud infrastructure?

And in doing so, we are able to solve few things. A, we are able to allow only least religious required for that application, for that infrastructure, which otherwise people are guessing. Uh, so, you know, locking down the IAM rules, defining them by default, putting the security best policies, best practices into place, into generation process.

So yeah, you actually, you're absolutely right. I mean, uh, right now I don't, I wouldn't say that Gena is a buzz or is just a hype. I think there is something there, but we all need to be careful and watchful of how industry will evolve, what the use case it will be used for.

And right now, it's not working for infrastructure, right? It is, it's just not, because I, I can't, I can't look into my customer's eyes and tell them, Hey, you know, we build this solution using L LMS and using gene AI and, you know, type something and get a magical infrastructure. No, because if I prompt it in a different way and I'm getting a different network protocol, then, you know, then how do you Trust you get something very different?

Yeah. And, and that, and that's the, that's the fact of it, right? I think there's nothing, you don't have to be embarrassed or nothing bad about saying, Hey, it's not the right tool for this job today.

Maybe tomorrow, but not today. And, and that's what, and that's what you're saying. You're saying, Hey, you know, we are all watching, but if, if it works, we'll be the first ones to adopt.

We have the right technology, right? Right. Team.

But we have the good building blocks and good, good, good glues together to put together. But it's not, it's not there. I mean, it is, it's a fact.

I mean, you know, the, you know, we great examples, examples after examples. In fact, you talked about the research report. You're right, we will, we are doing our own research, uh, on this topic.

Uh, and, uh, we'll soon be talking also about that. I wouldn't doubt give you data and not wanna steal the thunder from a marketing team, but we'll soon be talking about that. I mean, I'm gonna hold you to that.

Speaking of team, though, a lot, the, the announcement in addition to the seed round and the rebrand, new leadership go to market, uh, additions. You wanna mention that? Who, what are we talking?

Yeah, sure. So I think we, we are, we, uh, so Arsha, uh, we brought Arsha as a, as a co-founder, actually. He was pretty much involved with assets.

I, from day one, just that he had his own prior, he was actually at a private equity as an operating partner. He had some hand, you know, some tradition things that he couldn't really solve at the time that we started the company. So he joined few months late, uh, five to six months after our journey.

But he joined as a co-founder. He is, he brings a very good understanding of, um, running large scale organizations, scaling a startup, uh, enterprise sales, operations, customer success. Um, he was the, like I said, operating partner at a private equity firm right before he joined us.

Before that he was the head of Accenture, India, Fidelity's investment. So he understands the gamut of what we're building fairly, fairly well. He understands enterprise market fairly well.

Um, so he brings that flavor to us when as we think of scaling, go to market and, uh, next phase of our revolution. Um, we also have a people like, like Daniel who brings, uh, the, you know, she's A-C-N-C-F ambassador from the marketing. We have Lauren who brings the DevOps experience, where having worked at HashiCorp as a port manager.

So we, uh, uh, Caesar, who was also in my prior journey at Acura, he brings a security, uh, domain. So you, you think, as you think of a leadership team, it's basically a blend of developer mindset, uh, DevOps and security and scaling that, that Russia brings to the table. Those are my people.

Yeah. Um, Sasha, I, I know you're tired. I appreciate you coming on here on right off the plane.

com? io, what is it? com.

io. We still, we don't own that domain. Nobody's using it, but nobody wants to sell it to us.

Uh, unless, okay. Well that's okay. If you've got the dio, we, and look, take it from me.

com you're good. com, we've got ai, we've got a lot of other, other domains. Uh, that's what count.

com. We have a developer edition available. Uh, you know, we are also making a couple of new announcements.

One, we are also available on a s marketplace. We are doing a press release tomorrow, so it's sort of middle. By the time I think this video, this, this, this, uh, this interview gets, this Will go out another two, a day or two.

Yeah. Sort of be right there. So, so we are on a s marketplace.

Uh, we are also, uh, doing a community building. Uh, we are also hosting seven sessions. So, you know, we are, we are generally available, so people should be able to try it, give us feedback, and look forward to engaging.

Hey, congratulations Sasha. I love to see you build these things and, and, and watch them work out. I'm sure you'll stay in touch.

We'll have you back on soon. Sure. Thanks, Alan, for having us.

Thank you. Bye. All Right, go get some rest, my friend.

Be in touch. Sasha Al, serial entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of his latest company, stack Gen here on Tech Drunk tv. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be back in just a minute.