In another universe, Netlify pitched itself as one more hosting platform.
Chris Bach, its cofounder, told me that with that pitch, “there was no way we could have raised a dime.”
Today Netlify is used by 10M developers, and in 2021 it raised $105M at a $2B valuation.
Chris isn't a developer. He studied film, so I asked him what Silicon Valley could learn from it.
His answer: storytelling.
For him, a good story is a chain that has to hold.
An insight becomes a product, people adopt it, it turns into a business, and that business can scale.
When his cofounder, Matt Biilmann, showed him an early product, Chris kept asking questions until they could see every link in that chain.
That's the step he sees many in the Valley skip, believing “having a unique technical insight is enough.”
Hosting was a zero-sum game, so they drew a line around a new category, built on Git, modern browsers and JavaScript frameworks, and named it Jamstack.
And the story had proof: when they raised a $2.1M seed round in 2016, Netlify already served 250M requests a month, with WeWork and Sequoia Capital as paying clients.
In the episode, Chris explains how to raise when you don't fit Silicon Valley's "Stanford hacker and MBA" mold, how to market to developers who hate being marketed to, and why AI now lets a full-service company scale.
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Or jump straight to the key moments (YouTube):
[23:59] How to raise when you don't fit Silicon Valley’s “Stanford hacker and MBA” mold
[36:19] How to market to developers, who hate being marketed to
[52:51] Why AI lets a full-service company scale
