Sanjeev Sharma on Boosting Platform Velocity and Developer Efficiency with AI at StackGen

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to our day two coverage, my wrap up of, uh, day two here on Techstrong tv. You think it's a wrap up?

You see this guy sitting next to me is saying, oh, Shimmy's doing Textron Gang. But no, you come to an event like this, you never know who you're gonna meet. I look up from my chair where I've been bolted in all day, and who's walking over here, but none other than my friend's.

Sanjeep Sharmer, of course, if you guys follow a text drug gang, you know, Sanji is a, a gang member, frequent guest. But I, I'll tell you the truth, you know, I, I started Text Strong in 20 13, 20 14. com and, you know, one of the first people who contributed and, and was part of it was this gentleman right here at the time, Sanjeev was the, uh, field CTO of DevOps worldwide for IBM.

And, and we struck up a relationship. I, we, as we did the, uh, I think we were called not DevOps days, Jenkins Days Cloud these days, and we had DevOps connect Yep. With the different in-person events we were doing.

Sanjeev was always there to do a keynote for us, give us the latest research and findings and feelings of IBM on it. Like all good things that came to an end. Sanjeev moved on from ib.

I feel like we're doing, this is Your life. I know Chief Shava. I know.

Seriously. Sanjeev moved on from IBM and he went to work at, uh, truist. No, before that I went to Delphix.

That's right. He went to work at Delphix, a, a, a DevOps startup and did some amazing things there as part of the executive team. Then went to Truist Twist the merger, The merger and integration of two large banks.

Then went on to Dell where you have a senior position in the cloud. Well, I was the senior vice president of platform engineering for Platform, had the developer platform for all, you know, 15,000 plus developers at Dell. Absolutely.

And, and then recently, I, you know, I thought Sanjeev retired to be a, a venture capitalist. No, he didn't. I knew he wasn't being a venture capitalist, but he's been on, uh, on Textron gang with us, and always happy to give his opinion on the state of tech, but lo and behold, he's here because he's got another job.

He's got a new gig. We're happy for him and happy to hear about it. So you don't have to introduce yourself.

I introduce you. I know. Crazy man.

I mean, listen, we've known each other for a long time. We doing, we've been watching this industry evolve for a long time. Yes.

So it was time for me to go be a part of a fast paced AI startup, which is focused on solving the problem we've actually been trying to solve for over a decade. So that's where, that's how I ended up at Stack Gen. I, my, my official title is VP of Platform and Customer Success, you know, beautiful.

Uh, I own the, you know, I, I'm responsible essentially as, you know, actings field, CTO kind of role. Okay. Uh, working with customers, which is what I love to do.

Absolutely. com started, couple of articles I wrote were about the IMPOTUS mismatch, the speed mismatch Yes. Between developer velocity and infrastructure or platform velocity.

Today, a decade later, it has not been solved still, right? Yeah. I think we had reached an equilibrium where developers were somewhat happy with infrastructure speed and infrastructure was somewhat happy with, you know, all the pressure from development.

But then Gen AI happened, and now what are we seeing? Developer velocity is accelerating even faster and not it's time for platform to keep up. And that's what Stack Gen is solving.

We are solving that platform velocity issue by, you know, if AI writes your code, AI should run your platform is our thesis. Yeah. And we have, uh, agents which can maintain and manage and govern your platform for you.

And I'm like, man, this is the place for me. This was like designed for me. So here I am.

It Really is good for you. I'm really happy for you too. Thank you.

Thank you. A, You know, taking a page outta my own VC book, I was never a VC either, but I, I've been around enough VCs and I did stay in a number of Holiday Inn expresses. One of the things VCs look for when they go make an investment is team, what's the team done?

Is this a team that's going to execute? Is this a team that could get us where we want it to be? And I think that's one of the strongest parts of the Stack gen story, right?

You're joining a team here, the CEO, I think it's the sixth or seventh startup. I know. I followed him on the last three or four.

Um, and it's not just him, the the core group, CTOs, VP engineering, sales, been there, done that, been there, done that. Because you know what, you've worked at the biggest companies, Dell and IBM and big banks, worldwide banks, you've worked at startups, but this is a startup juggernaut, right. Their, their, their MO is, they come in and within 3, 4, 5 years at most, but three or four years, they've got people knocking on their door to buy the business.

Yeah. I mean, we, uh, as far as customers are concerned, we already have customers knocking on our door. Yes.

Right. And you know, the rest will follow. Absolutely.

And they know the day. Our goal is, are we, the question to ask is, are we solving the customer's problems? Yeah.

Right. And you know, I've, I've actually known the company for, for some time now. I've been following them other than I've known Sachin for the founder for several years.

Yeah. But what I wanted to see was, is it a product still trying to figure out where is place in the market? Right.

So no market Fit. Exactly. Uh, or is it a product where the customers are coming to us and saying, these are my problems and your, your product can, can solve it.

And, uh, we are, we are doing that. It's an early stage startup, so we've got a long way to go. The product still has to develop and evolve, but we have, uh, you know, marquee brand name, you know, fortune 500 type customers.

Yes. Uh, who are already using the product. And, uh, one of my roles as you know, VP of customer success is to be that bridge between what customers are seeing, how customers want to use the product, and then back with product management and engineering to make sure our roadmap aligns with what's happening in the market.

So it's very much a two-way, it's Definitely a two way, two way street. That's how I, I've always seen a field CTO slash customer success team. It's not like, you know, take a square peg and put it in the customer's round hole.

Right. It is like, figure out what kind of hole And then go back The heat of the customer is what's missing in the customer. Right.

Right. And then figure out what out of those can be used in the broader market. Right.

Because they'll be customers who come with very unique and novel needs, which only fit them for the right customer corner cases. Exactly. There'll be edge cases always.

Uh, obviously we want to serve a large set of customers. So that was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn in startups in my startup career is that you can't build for edge cases. You gotta build for the market, not the edge.

And I don't mean the edge, like Core edge. Yeah. That edge.

Yeah. He like, he liked that edge. Yeah.

But, um, and then I made that mistake. You know, I'm watching Mitch, Ashley's out in front of us there. Mitch and I built a platform.

We, we took our vulnerability management tool and turned it on its head for a company for a very unique case work, you know, case. And we spent an like two whole product cycles. This is when we used to do, you know, a product cycle Sure.

Every six months. So we spent almost a year and we finally made that product exactly what this edge case needed. That company's name was Lehman Brothers.

And the year that, the year I think was 2007, and they went out of business, took us a year, took us a year to build the product for them, for their Leman Live portal. I'll never forget this. And then before we could collect the money.

Wait, isn't Leman live where you go find out what the prices of the CDOs are? Yeah, Exactly. Yeah, I know what that is.

Um, classic story. Classic. But, but seriously, that's where I learned that you can't, you can't build for the edge cases.

You've gotta build for the meat of the market. Yeah. And, and it requires somebody, people who have experience in the market Yeah.

Actually look at an edge case and say, are they just ahead of the curve and everybody else will come here? Or are they truly an outlier? Right.

And there's a judgment call there, because you might, you, you might not know far, but this they Might is why I say team is important. Absolutely. One person cannot know everything.

Absolutely. The team is important. And we as a team then need to decide, okay.

Really analyze and say, step back and say, okay, let's double click on this. Are others going to do the same thing? And you can query other customers.

Customers want to help you also. You know, one of the things I've found out, having worked for large vendors, right? I've always been, except for my truist Dell days, I've always been in client facing Yes.

Roles, even at IBM. Right. The customers also want the startup to succeed.

Right. When I was at Dell or at Truist, and we would acquire a product from a startup, we wanted them to succeed. We were betting on them because their success, success Definition.

Exactly Right. Nobody wanted to buy a product and then the company is gone. Yep.

Right. Uh, you know, like, uh, we, we, you know, and, and no companies don't survive. And then what do you do?

And that happens. We can't control that. But, uh, it's always a partnership.

And I think that is a, that's needs to be fostered properly. And that's why, you know, uh, the team, uh, wanted to bring somebody like Neon who has actually done that, who's got the battle scars to say, Hey, I ran, I run platform engineering teams both in a regulated environment, in a highly scaled, global environment that, uh, that brings that experience. And, uh, hopefully I can help, uh, truly add value as we go forward.

I love it. Sanjeev, we gotta wrap up here. Absolutely.

I want to congratulate you, you, and thank you, and wish you a lot of success with Stack Gen. As I said, I I, I've followed this company since before they announced, came outta stealth as well. And I, and you know, I think that there's a high probability of success there, and I think you improved that probability.

And I'm sure this won't be the last time we have you on talk. Absolutely not. You're not kicking me out of the gang.

No. Well, I got ideas. We're thinking about getting gang jackets, motorcycle jackets with.

I like that. I like that. Maybe we should, we should make a album like a rock album cover or something.

Get together something. No, I was think like a TV show, like Sons of Anarchy or something. Yeah.

Nice. I love it. That's what we need.

Yeah. Sanjeev, thank you. Sanjeev Farmer Stack Gen here on Tech Drunk tv.

Hey, that's gonna wrap up day two. We'll be back tomorrow though. We've got a, well, it's not a full day.

I think things end at two here tomorrow, but we'll be back in the morning giving it to you live, and we'll be doing wrap up count on us for your cube con information. But for now, this is Alan Shimel. Thanks for watching.

We're out.