Omry Hay | env0 | How to Build a Product for DevOps

Description

Omry Hay is the co-founder and CTO of env0, which builds a platform for managing deployments and cloud environments on top of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi and more). In conversation with Eyal David he tells how the pain of waiting for a ticket to land in the DevOps team's sprint became a company: validation with 50 to 60 companies, a $650K pre-seed from Grove Ventures in 2019, then a seed, a Series A with Microsoft and $42M raised in total. He walks through two decisive pivots: moving from VP R&D and the self-service vision to DevOps engineers and their day-to-day, and building a self-hosted agent for JFrog that opened up a whole enterprise segment. He explains why, in such a technical product, a product person must understand the story behind feedback and generalize it, and why at env0 R&D does much of the product work. Finally he tells the story of the August 2023 earthquake, when HashiCorp changed Terraform's license, and of founding OpenTofu together with competitors, as well as five months of reserve duty after October 7 that reshaped his role.

Key moments

1. 0:00 · Opening and meeting Omry Hay
2. 2:05 · env0 by the numbers: people, sites and funding
3. 3:52 · What Infrastructure as Code is and what env0 does
4. 6:27 · Self-service: templates and policies for developers
5. 7:57 · The pain behind the idea: waiting for the DevOps sprint
6. 10:57 · Validation with 50 companies and the first pre-seed
7. 14:45 · The first bet: converting legacy environments to code
8. 17:07 · Who to sell to: VP R&D or Head of DevOps
9. 19:09 · The pivot to the DevOps persona
10. 23:07 · JFrog and the self-hosted agent that opened up enterprise
11. 25:00 · The funding journey: from $650K to $42M
12. 27:12 · Where env0 is today
13. 28:38 · A co-founder's day-to-day and five months of reserve duty
14. 31:21 · The most important product skills in a technical product
15. 35:06 · When R&D does product
16. 38:37 · The earthquake: HashiCorp changes Terraform's license
17. 43:55 · Competitors unite: founding OpenTofu
18. 46:25 · From petition to fork to the Linux Foundation
19. 47:59 · Closing: what Omry wishes himself in ten years