AMA w/ Rasmus Makwarth (Bucket) - what it's like to get acquired and why start a new DevTool company
Hey Product Hunt!
@roncohen and I are building @Bucket to enable developers in SaaS to ship the right features, faster.
Before that, we co-founded @Opbeat , got acquired by @ElasticSearch , ran the 100+ Observability team, quit, co-founded another devtool company, raised VC funding again, hired a wonderful team (remote).
Above all, we love crafting world-class developer tools.
If you have any questions related to dev tools, product craftsmanship, next-gen feature flags, trunk-based development, developer experience, starting a company, remote work, raising VC funds, getting acquired, being based in Europe (Copenhagen), and of course... Bucket — please do ask!
I'll answer them by launch day on March 18th!
Replies
Product Hunt
Had you worked in a large company before Elastic Search? What are the things that you learned while running observability at Elastic Search that raised your game significantly when founding Bucket? What are you doing the most different from Opbeat?
Bucket
@rajiv_ayyangar keeping the team small and senior for as long as possible is a key learning for me. Especially when working remotely. It's somewhat counter-intuitive but small, aligned and skilled teams can move so much faster. With co-pilots and modern devtools, they'll just get even faster.
Bucket
The bit after an acquisition is often called 'golden handcuffs' — did it really feel like that? What made you want to do it all over again with @Bucket ?
Bucket
@_gw we felt right at home at Elastic since it was led by Shay, who's the founder and an engineer. But yeah, you are financially cuffed to the acquirer, so that's exactly what it feels like :) I left after two years though, which meant leaving a lot of money on the table, so you make of the cuffs what you want.
I love building a new, innovative and polished product with small, like-minded team members. You can't get that anywhere but in startups, so I always knew I was going back at some point. Also, had I not, it'd have been such a waste of all the learnings from Opbeat and Elastic.
Bucket
I never asked: how did you @makwarth and @roncohen meet?
Bucket
@roncohen @fmerian Haha, that's a fun story: I was hacking on this Danish community website way back. Before Twitter and Facebook! The web was starting to take off, but I was missing a link sharing community to learn about it all. I asked the community for engineering help and someone on the site recommended Ron. We ended up Skyping and working on this community site for about 6 months before meeting IRL!