Episode 434 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ted Julian, CEO & Founder of Flux.
Lots of successful people are very humble. They might credit their success to timing, luck, or another reason to downplay things which is a trait that I do admire. Ted fits the bill here, as he’s very humble.
But, as you’ll hear in this podcast interview, his track record is extraordinary. He’s been part of the founding team or leadership team for not 1, not 2, not 3… but 4 exits. Very few, if any, have that type of track record in Boston.
It’s obvious that he knows how to time the market with the right product and build an exceptional team to execute and scale.
That is exactly why I am so incredibly excited about what he is working on right now. With the current paradigm shift to AI, there is a rare opportunity for proven founders to swing for the fences and build massive anchor tech companies in Boston.
Ted’s latest company is Flux, which recently announced $5M in funding round led by Calibrate Ventures, with participation from True Ventures and Glasswing. They have built a code-first engineering intelligence platform that gives engineering leaders ground-truth visibility into the work actually happening across today’s complex, AI-accelerated codebases.
Think of it this way: Salesforce completely digitized the sales pipeline, HubSpot digitized the marketing funnel… now, with AI tools helping developers ship code faster than ever before, Flux provides the missing system of record to ensure engineering organizations are optimized with less risk and are aligned with business outcomes.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of great topics, including:
- Ted’s lesson learned around go-to-market strategies & getting early adopter customers.
- How he got his career started as an analyst for the tech research industry.
- Co-Founding @Stake, a pioneering cybersecurity company which was acquired by Symantec and has an amazing roster of alumni.
- A journey through the other exited companies that being Arbor Networks, Application Security, & Resilient.
- Why he continues to build.
- All the details on Flux, its platform, and funding.
- And, so much more!
Transcript
Keith Cline (02:50)
Ted, thanks so much for joining us.
Ted Julian (02:53)
Pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite, Keith.
Keith Cline (02:55)
It was great running into you. So this is why things like Boston Tech Week needs to happen. Cause we were both at the underscore offices. Been a while, so we caught up and it was just like learning a lot more of what you’re up to with Flux So we’re gonna talk a lot about Flux, and you just announced a new round of funding, so a lot of exciting momentum behind the company. But before we get into all that, your background story and everything, ⁓
I was listening to another podcast that you did, and you had this quote that kind of stuck out at me. And it was called Failure is an orphan. Success, on the other hand, everyone is involved. So, what have been your biggest lessons learned in the world of startups, right? Building to product market fit, because you have had so many different roles from, you know, leading product, leading marketing, now CEO. So what like w what what is your approach in this new AI era?
And go to market and figuring everything out.
Ted Julian (03:53)
Yeah, I mean… All startups, I think well, first the caveat, like AI is upending everything. And so like so much of the stuff that we’re gonna talk about, like are these best practices, are are these beliefs still true? But they’re being tested, we’ll just put it that way. ⁓ so anyway, I was gonna say all startups I think are either making a market or disrupting an existing market. and I think it’s very important to sort of be cognizant of that because it informs everything that you do, from like how do you even build the product, I think to some degree, but certainly… certainly, how you go to market. ⁓ just to give a simple example, right? The one of the awesome things about disrupting an existing market is that you presumably have built a better mousetra and you just go after all those customers and you say, you know, try my thing, and after like a couple months, you’re gonna like kick that piece of junk out the door and you’re gonna beg to keep, you know, this beautiful thing that I’ve built for you.
You know, the downside of course is like you’re nobody and these people that you’re trying to disrupt, if it’s worth disrupting, are very, very big. So it sounds great, but it’s very hard to do. Whereas whereas making a market, totally different ball game, you know. I mean, ⁓ the budget doesn’t exist, the thing doesn’t exist, and so you’re having to sort of persuade the universe ⁓ that what this new thing is and why they should care and all the fabulous benefits they’re gonna get from it, and there better be enough early adopters who will buy it on the vision so that you can earn your way to when the category ultimately gets created and now you’ve got like a line item that you can start to go after.
Keith Cline (05:28)
Which that’s the tricky thing, right? So if you’re creating a new market, now we’re talking you gotta convince that we can there’s the problem, that we could solve your problem. And then those things like POCs come up, proof of concepts, right? And then those things and then the analysts aren’t even like talking about this space yet. So so how do you get those early adopter customers?
Ted Julian (05:49)
it it it gets to I think the importance of that that vision, right? In the disrupting a market thing, like the market’s already defined, the category’s defined, these guys should have decent visions for where that category’s gonna be. And so again, your your focus is much more on like we do a couple things and they by the way are the most important things you care about better because we have this next generation approach, right? Whereas making a market, like, yeah, it’s defining the thing and its set of capabilities and why they are so important and then ultimately building out like if you believe like these are the way this is how you should evaluate the solutions in this category because these are the criteria that are the most important and why they’re the most important criteria. I mean it is just a lot, a lot of work and it takes time and it requires I think a very different capability set, frankly, certainly in the go to market team, but I would say even more broadly to to get it right.
Right.
And again, why I think it’s so important to like think about this and kind of know who you are and then build the team and your your plan for how you’re gonna prosecute the business accordingly.
Keith Cline (06:58)
All right, well let’s talk about your background. So you study at Cornell. How how did you get your career started?
Ted Julian (07:04)
A buddy of mine ⁓ from school was a client of IDC, the market research company. ⁓ and they were looking for a new analyst in their PC group. So this group of analysts just writing about the computer business back at that time. and so he they said they had the opening and he just recommended me for that job and I moved from Ithaca to Boston. yeah, that’s how I got started.
Keith Cline (07:32)
Okay, so you were doing the analyst thing. How how did you become a co founder of @Stack which is a company that I remember well and just remember like Christina Luconi, I am like consider her, you know, beyond a a business acquaintance, more of a friend at this point. But I had ⁓ Chris Wysopal on episode 209 you know, Veracode So amazing team. So so how did you get involved with that company?
Ted Julian (07:57)
So I was at Forrester at the time. ⁓ the internet was commercializing. So everybody was connecting them, you know, building a website and otherwise connecting the business to the internet. And so now for the first time you’ve got a network that had been isolated from the rest of the world, connected to all of the world. And ⁓ it was just obvious that people didn’t really know what they were doing and they really needed help. And so I had been thinking about starting a consulting company to help people do this. And talking with different people, I got connected to Battery Ventures who also had a thesis going, couldn’t find an existing thing to fund. And so I joined them effectively as an entrepreneur in residence. And that’s ultimately what led to ⁓ @Stake, which ⁓ yeah, like just Google like @Stake diaspora or whatever. It’s a thing. Like we had an incredible collection of talent. I think it’s safe to say perhaps this the single strongest collection of cyber talent across like multiple
Keith Cline (08:53)
Even ⁓ so the company that Chris was a part of that you acquired, like they were testifying in front of Congress and there’s that legendary picture like of
Ted Julian (08:58)
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are there are there are more stories than there might be storage about. Like the early @Stake days, the the people who joined and what their backstory is. We did some crazy engagements, like just breaking into some very interesting places. We’ll just leave it at that. That’s another episode maybe.
Keith Cline (09:05)
Ha ha ha.
That’s right. So the company was acquired by Semantic. What did you do next?
Ted Julian (09:28)
Yeah. After that, Arbor ⁓ Networks, which is anti D DOS. And this too was kind of ⁓ back with Battery and pursuing a thesis there and helping them with the due diligence. And to make a long story short, that’s how I met Dr. Farnam Jahanian and one of his grad students, Rob Malan, who are at University of Michigan, with some anti D DOS technology, ⁓ and just really hit it off with them and the round hadn’t really closed and they just sort of said, Look, Ted, like whether or not we go with battery or somebody else, would you join us as like the third founder to run marketing? and I was thrilled to do it. It’s an incredible team, cool technology.
Keith Cline (10:10)
And l so during that s stretch, like how how did you grow the company and ’cause another, you know, acquisition.
Ted Julian (10:15)
yeah.
I mean, it was a tough time in the market, especially for anybody telecom oriented, which we were. I mean, if you’re doing denial of service protection, it’s the biggest of enterprises and then carriers who are your customers. ⁓ but we just had I mean, the the attacks were real, ⁓ very real. And even though the economy was not in good shape, and even though telecoms were going out of business, right? Worldcom went out of business, Qwest went out of business. In fact, I’m pretty sure when Qwest’s came out of bankruptcy, one of the first things they bought was Arbor.
I mean that just gets to how pressing a problem it was for ⁓ all of these carriers. and so yeah, despite legendarily difficult conditions, we managed to grow the business and double every year with some, you know, major logos and massive deployments. yeah. It was fun. And a lot and there too, like, there’s a whole mafia out of that company too, probably best known being Dug Song, who was the founder of Duo, north of two billion dollar exit to Cisco for that ⁓ authentication business. ⁓ and I would have told you back then, like I he he he blushes, he gets embarrassed, but like the first time I met Dug, he was a legendary hacker. He had DSniff, this hacking tool for pulling passwords off of Wi-Fi. ⁓ Like literally if you were in a sales call, geeks at the customer would be like, wait, DSniff’s in there. Like, what conference room? I want to go meet him and get his autograph. But anyway, it was clear that he wasn’t just a tech a great technical person. He was a great start up person as well. And he ended he proved that in spades, did better than all of us basically.
Keith Cline (11:56)
All right. So what was next on the on the journey from there?
Ted Julian (12:00)
So AppSec, database security software, making a market did not exist. So doing doing vulnerability assessment but for databases. So vulnerability assessment for networks, endpoint, that existed, but not at the database. yeah, and then that that ultimately led to a decent ⁓ outcome as well. Yeah, I mean all of them have b ever if everything I’ve done so far, knockwood, has made money. So
Keith Cline (12:23)
So
and and that’s the theme here, cause I like well okay, I wanna talk about Resilient and then I wanna, you know, talk about what you just said. It’s like you have this consistency of okay, I’m not gonna keep talking because I wanna get let’s talk about Resilient, then I’m gonna get into what I was just about to say. so so how did Resilient come together and what was that company all about?
Ted Julian (12:28)
Mm.
So I was… I’ve known Rick Grinnell from his fair well, long before … Fairhaven. I mean, geez, we’re pushing thirty years now. ⁓ and I’d always wanted to work with him. And around that time they were doing due diligence on a company called Co3 System which was basically privacy company to help organizations deal with the proliferation of privacy regs that are happening at the time. And in due diligence, I said, that’s not bad, but you know what? You could take that same product and you could make it a cyber incident response product. Like not just privacy breaches, but any kind of cyber breach. Like could be a DDoS attack, could be malware, could be ransomware, whatever. Like put the playbooks in there and help people better deal with these things, because it’s absurd at the time. Like you have rockets, you have r you know, man in the moon.
Kind of technology for detecting attacks and for trying to prevent attacks, and the crap hits the fan, and you’ve got a breach, and you grab the PDF, or you literally grab like the binder with the best practices off the shelf. Like it’s so completely insane. So that was the idea at the time was like that should be software that you so that you can both you know ensure adherence to the best practices because that is wicked important when you’re in a breach, like people need to follow the protocol.
All and it’s when they don’t that you really get in trouble. and by the way, you could then track it all, and but and then and then we added automation, you could automate those tasks ⁓ and all the rest. So that’s a classic like market creation. Like incident response as a category didn’t really even exist, let alone SOAR. ⁓ and I think it’s very safe to say, given just given our timing, there was no one else doing it. That we could literally kind of both created incident response as an uber category and then defined what a set of capabilities that Gartner called SOAR later on.
Keith Cline (14:38)
So Ted, I I would have to put you in one of the top tier of operators in Boston. Like your your track record is extraordinary. I’m not trying to just pump up your tires here, but as I was preparing for our interview, I’m like, I knew your background kind of high level, mainly probably like the Resilient stuff. And then then I was looking at I’m like, wait a second, another acquisition, another acquisition, another acquisition. So like w what is it about ’cause obviously sometimes you were involved in the the founding of the company, so you had to figure out is this the right idea market? Sometimes you joined a company, so is this the right team? So like what is like your philosophy when you’re thinking about what’s next?
Ted Julian (15:19)
Dude, well thank you. I gotta tell ya, to me it feels more like just surviving. You know. ‘Cause that’s really I mean, honestly, like at a day to day level, that’s pretty much what it is. Just not giving up. I mean we just use Resilient as a
Keith Cline (15:24)
Ha ha ha.
Punishment. You like punishment. That’s what you like. Right. And how many of these companies did you have that moment of like not about to make payroll? Like those like on the edge moments of
Ted Julian (15:42)
All of…All of Yeah. I mean, ⁓ Resilient was was financially the best outcome of all of but yeah, there were days where like we were there’s months left on payroll. but I mean vindication, like
Anybody who was around at the time remembers the day we closed Microsoft, the day we closed Apple, the day we closed Facebook. And honestly, all those happened within the space of like just a couple months. So it kind of was a rags to riches phenomena. ⁓ and probably part of the reason you’re shaking his head is like some of those people don’t buy stuff. You know, they don’t buy software, like they build things. totally. Really unusual.
Keith Cline (16:24)
Yeah.
I never heard s people say, ⁓ Apple is my customer. Like that n that that doesn’t happen
Ted Julian (16:32)
but you know, I think first of all, I you have to say like timing is the X factor. And that and b by extension luck. and so I think that’s kind of what was the deal there is that
hindsight showed that this is a valuable category and that people needed this. That’s a fact. ⁓ but the you know, why that year? Why not the year before? Why not the year later? Who knows? I mean there’s just all these other factors involved here. So ⁓ yeah, I don’t know. I would net it out in the nice thing about an analyst’s background, I think, as a founder is that if you spent time doing that, you understand a market, you understand market dynamics, you understand all of a lot of the outbound parts of marketing in terms of crafting a story and understanding competitive differentiation, how to deposition people, all those kind of positioning tactics. And those are really, really helpful skills for a founder that your canonical engineering founder would have no reason to have. I mean, if you’ve come up through the engineering stack, like how could you really, in a detailed fashion understand those things? ⁓ and so to the that maybe to the degree that I was able to survive, that’s sort of why. Like that’s what I was able to bring to the table, maybe that was unique. I guess the only other thing I would say in my defense is just like, good sense of like strengths and weaknesses for myself and trying not to be overly sensitive about that and just like being frank and honest and staffing around it. And also like making decisions, you know, like @Stake I’d not done anything other than analysts before then. Like I I tapped out. Like I saw the company was outgrowing me and basically just went to the investors and said, This is what I see happening. Like what should we do? and ⁓ yeah, like they were they were f shocked at first, and then they were like, This is what you should do. Like, nobody does this, but what you did is exactly what you should do. And it’s what left led to Arbor, which ultimately was a better outcome anyway. But ⁓ yeah, I guess just offering proof point of that. Yeah, and all of those things plus just like d dogged determination, like you gotta you will get kicked down way, way, way more times ⁓ than you can even possibly imagine. And you just gotta be the kind of person that just dusts themselves off, gets back up, figures out like how what went wrong, how can we do better and keeps going.
Keith Cline (19:07)
All right, well, to connect the dots a little bit here. So you mentioned Rick Grinnell, who is awesome, obviously Glasswing now, and I love the whole Glasswing team. They’re extraordinary. So you spent a stand with them as a venture partner where knowing you know what a prototypical VC looks like, it’s your background, right? Operator, success, exits, knows what patterns, what looks like, what good looks like, good teams market.
That could have been your ride into the sunset, right? Just kick back and be a VC, right? But you chose to to become an operator and a founder again. So to why and what are you doing now?
Ted Julian (19:37)
Yeah.
You probably hear this from a lot of people, which is just this time is too interesting to pass up. and there’s like there’s two sides to the coin here, don’t get me wrong. Like there’s a dark side too, but the but the positive side is like the ability to prototype things and build things and test things and stuff like that is ⁓ accelerating ⁓ businesses enormously. And I mean, I’m not a technical person, but I’m really curious and I like playing with technology. And so if you’re wired like that at all, like it’s just a super fun time to tinker and build, right? You have people coding that have never coded before. Marketers are coding, salespeople are coding, everybody’s coding. ⁓ so that was a piece of it. But ⁓ for sure it was in addition. Okay, great. So maybe it’s be fun to do something. it was looking at the this was very early in code generation, like long before Claude blew up like it has over the last 18 months, months of two years, but stuff still like it was GitHub copilot basically at the time. And just seeing this and I’m like, I’ve s exactly. Yeah. ⁓ so seeing that and being like, Holy shit, there is a transformation that is gonna happen in engineering that has never happened before.
Keith Cline (20:43)
And so this is like four years ago, sorry to interrupt but like yeah.
Ted Julian (20:56)
Despite all despite the internet, despite cloud, mobile, you name it, like this is gonna be bigger than all of them. ⁓ yeah, and so the the entrepreneur on me like, this is too good to fast up, like ⁓ this is gonna be a biggie and it’ll also be fun just because like it is such a enormous sea change that we are in the midst of right now with how AI is transforming this this this function in a business. And as I said, it’s never happened before. Like
We digitized sales with Salesforce. We digitized marketing with HubSpot. How did we digitize engineering? What was the engineering SaaS app?
Keith Cline (21:35)
Didn’t exist.
Ted Julian (21:37)
No, do
There still isn’t one, arguably. ⁓ so that that that’s how it culminated to me. Like that was the cliff note version of the story is like this will happen. AI is perfect to bring this to engineering because code code is structured. I mean, shit, if we can write poems and do all this other stuff with the English language, like code should be easy. ⁓ so that was the initial idea, and then just sort of digging into that was was realizing, okay, like there’s gonna be chaos here with the pace of change, and there’s gonna be risk…risk with the pace of change and ⁓ so what could we do with that to sort of help engineering leaders ⁓ manage this transformation that they’re they’re leaning into those those were some of the founding thoughts that kind of went into the beginning and that have informed our journey since
Keith Cline (22:27)
So what’s the the state of the state today with the platform? Like what what’s the core of where where Flux is is focused?
Ted Julian (22:33)
Yeah. So… I mean that that really is it. If you want to manage the AI transformation, and in particular if you want an easy way to prove the ROI of the engineering transformation that you are driving, we are I think it’s I’ll tell I’ll give you my proof. Like we’re the only company that can really do that. And that’s because of our code first approach. ⁓ everything that has come before us, and then even our peers that are like next-gen AI players trying to sort of destroy
Engineering intelligence, if you want to call that as a category. ⁓ Other than us, they all work with derivatives of the work, meaning they look at your JIRA or your ticketing system, whatever that is. They’re looking at how things are tagged in GitHub. That’s their input to try to give you insight as to what’s happening in engineering. And of course, the problem with that is that it’s a step removed from the actual code. And if if you are now 10x.
The amount of code that’s getting generated, maybe even more so once marketing and sales and everybody else starts generating code and engineering doesn’t want to be the no squad. There’s just no way to keep up. You can’t keep you can’t write the tickets fast enough. You know, you can’t update the tickets fast enough. ⁓ so that’s one part of it is that to be able to do this in the age of AI and short and the pace of change that’s happening, you really need to be code first. But then the other piece of it is code first is the only way that you can be agentic in your analysis of that code.
Because I don’t know how you would get agentic analyzing tickets around software. That feels kind of like a waste of time, honestly. But if you could if you can analyze the code, then you absolutely can do agentic analysis on what’s going on in engineering. And that’s where things get super interesting because you can not only identify potential issues, but you can automate your ability to get to root cause. Let me give you a very quick example. So one simple thing that anybody would want to do with any you know tool that’s in the market that we’re in would be track DORA metrics.
DORA is a standard for sort of measuring engineering productivity. And so you’re going to look at things like velocity and code quality and c how long it takes to do code reviews, things of this nature, various measurements to get a sense of the health of the engineering team. and so if you’re leaning in the code gen, the first bottleneck you’re gonna see is code review, because you’ve 10X’d your code creation, but do you have 10X of people doing code review?
Probably not. So you might try AI code review, that’ll help.
But it’s probably it’s not gonna make up for all that difference. And so that’s a simple example of like it’d be nice to flag when that is happening and to be able to deal with it. but then the next thing that’s gonna happen to you is over time code quality is gonna get worse, code complexity is gonna increase. This is where the people who are the first wave of code generation and leaned in the hardest are right now. ⁓ and this is why having quality as … part of your assessment is absolutely crucial. Because it’s great to say the velocity spiked, but if if
Quality has gone to shit, like that is not helpful. That is a that is a debt you’re gonna have to pay later on. So agentica analysis allows us to connect the dots and say, yes, velocity has slowed, and so we’ve noticed that and we’re letting you know. But in the background, what we did is we’ve been evaluating the code that that team whose velocity is slowing has been writing, and we can tell you a couple things. Complexity has been going up for the last six months, quality has been going down for the last three months, and new security vulnerabilities have been introduced over.
Over the last month, and when we look at what the team is working on right now, we can validate that those are exactly the things that they’re looking to address. Because we’re looking at we can see what they’re doing every pull request in the code. and by the way, like there’s a lot of churn in the code because they’re clearly struggling with trying to figure out how to remove this vulnerability that was introduced in a way that doesn’t mess up ⁓ the application. So this is where agentic is so important because it’s not just the alert that you have an issue, it’s the diagnosis of that issue, ⁓ determination of root cause and having done that, being able to make suggestions about what you should do about it. And then finally, where things get really interesting is you say, wow, shit, okay, you should be doing that for a customer. Like helping them do that consistently across the board. Like you’re doing that for one team. How do you then help this other team? Because, ⁓ look, like three months later, they’re in the exact same spot this one was. We proactively let you know, we share those best practices, we deal with that. And then being able to do that across all customers is where we develop a real moat in the business because we have a super unique data set about what’s going on out there. Basically, the state of engineering as it’s going through this AI transformation, you can imagine benchmarking. In fact, we’re writing up something on that right now that talks about these are the phases you go through. And you can imagine saying, well, based on this criteria, you are now at stage two. and here’s why. And here’s the things you need to do better. And to get to stage three, this is what you’d need to do based on how other people in the cohort are operating that look like you but are further along.
Keith Cline (27:41)
Now, as I mentioned when we first started our conversation here, y you just announced ⁓ a five million dollar round of funding. So what’s like what’s next? Like like hiring growth, like what what do you anticipate ⁓ moving forward?
Ted Julian (27:55)
Yeah, we’re leaning a bit into go to market, like we were you and I were talking about that off out of band earlier. ⁓ so we’ve got some nice resources there and you can see it in everything that we’re doing. Like ⁓ we’ve got
The funding press release, we’ve got a research survey that’s coming out next week. ⁓ we’ve got a brand new website. ⁓ you’ll be seeing us do more webinars, so a lot of go-to-market activities for sure. ⁓ but then the we’re also just leaning into the product because the timing looks really, really good for what we’re doing. Engineering leadership is moving beyond code gen and saying, all right, like there’s some things emerging here, what are we gonna do? They are under enormous pressure to prove ROI. Cause I’m sure you’ve surfaced in the things you read and probably even other of these conversations.
Like token consumption is a major issue. I mean, on the one hand, leadership is thrilled, like you’re leading in, you’re generating a lot of code. Thank you. Because we’ve been talking about that for the past six months at all our board meetings, but how are you spending a lot of money now? Like, are you sure that’s actually working? and we’re reading the leaderboards may be a bad idea because people were doing some silly crap and the the code was the code never even wound up in the code base, let alone in production. Like, why were we spending tokens on this? So, I mean, there’s they’re under a lot of pressure both to prove ROI.
Keith Cline (28:48)
Hehehe
Yeah, Uber, right? Uber had that news that came out. That was just like
Ted Julian (29:05)
And to prove maintaining quality and all the rest. So the timing looks really good. And so we’re kind of leaning into our code first architecture to really pay that out even more so. Like the agentics stuff I spent some time talking about is a big area of focus for us right now. Because we think that that’s how you pay out this combination of both being able to measure throughput and other productivity measures, but also quality measures. Like they’re two sides of a coin. And whoever wins in this market is gonna have to do both of them.
Agentic is gonna be how you do that by delivering value to the customer. So that’s what we’re really leaning into. And a little bit on tokens, actually. That that’s something that’ll be coming soon too. ⁓ it’s what you know actually measuring token consumption is not easy as it turns out, but I think that’s just the beginning. What the engineering leader really wants, and really what all parts of the business want, is connecting that to outcomes. Right? So for us, it’s the ability to say, yeah, you spent this these here’s how your teams used tokens. But by the way, like here’s what it did to the increasing feature velocity, for example, or ⁓ maintaining code quality. ⁓ all those things are gonna be critically important to really proving out that ROI ultimately, just having the numbers just the beginning. And here again, like code first, agentic analysis is gonna be really important.
Keith Cline (30:23)
So what was the fundraising process like? ⁓ you know, ’cause you have, you know, Glasswing local, but ⁓ Calibrate led the round. They’re West Coast based. So did you spend a lot of time on the West Coast trying to
Ted Julian (30:34)
Living, I’m living the East Coast entrepreneurs dream ’cause we added True in the round before that. So two thirds of my boards on the West Coast. How do you do that out of Boston? People would say this was impossible.
Keith Cline (30:40)
Right. Exactly, I noticed.
Ted Julian (30:47)
It’s it’s weird. I mean, as somebody who’s been doing this for a long time, ⁓ and we talked about this like when we ran into each other ⁓ at Boston Tech Week. I mean, it’s kinda like the best of times and the worst of times all at once right now. ’cause it used to be you double every year, right? So you’re gonna get to two million, you to four million, you get to eight million, like that’s how it’s done. And if you can pull those metrics off, like that’s a solid company. You know, but now it’s like one five twenty.
Keith Cline (31:16)
Yeah.
Ted Julian (31:17)
Which not everybody can do that, I’m sorry. Like and there’s too much VC. Like, I don’t know how you’re gonna be able to do all the deals you need to do if that’s your if that’s gonna be the the the hurdle that everybody has to clear. I mean thank God we’re not quite at that level yet, right? So this was ⁓ this is a seed round or seed extension. so, you know, it’s really A when I think when people really start to feel that pain ⁓ of this change in metrics. ⁓ so I guess this is a long way of saying that like given the stage that we’re at, you know, the market that you’re in and and the customers that you do have and the things that they have to say are are as important as as sort of a revenue number. you know, and that’s how we were able to get the the deal done. I mean I would say it’s a it’s a belief in the market first and foremost. Like that’s and that’s it that is as it should be. ⁓ but beyond that it’s also the team, you know, and we have a great team. I mean we’ve talked a little bit about my track record, but I’m far from the only person here. I’m lucky to have be working with some really powerful colleagues. You know, Aaron, ⁓ Beals, CTO, ⁓ from the Endeca Mafia. I know you’ve probably plumbed th a lot of the depths there. I mean, that has spawned so many great companies.
Keith Cline (32:32)
So many, so many. Yeah, Steve Papa, the legend was on episode something. I’ll put it in the show notes. But yes, absolutely.
Ted Julian (32:40)
I remember meeting him when I was an analyst. He was an Inktomi. This is like that’s a long time ago. He was
Keith Cline (32:44)
yeah, did no way. That’s cool. I love that story. Yeah, I mean like his story is out of control. Inktomi Akamai, which I n people don’t always put the Akamai with Steve Papa, which is just ⁓ crazy. Like with his track record Toast.
Ted Julian (32:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I like cake you know, a good cake has cake and icing. And this to me is Boston. I I like the ratios we have here. It’s not all icing, in other words.
Keith Cline (33:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
There’s actually substance cake. I love that analogy, that’s cool. Mm-hmm.
Ted Julian (33:16)
Not that others don’t have it, but I think we you know, we have a really strong claim there. ⁓ anyway, so d that’s just a long way of saying, like, if you look at this team, even right down to the devs, like these are people who’ve built enterprise class software products multiple times in their careers. and by the way, like w clean sheet of paper, so we’re leaning hard into AI for what we do. ⁓ you know, I don’t know that we’re necessarily a ten Dark Factory quite yet, but we’re probably a nine.
Yeah, so those are the things that I think anybody should be looking at, you know, is the team and our and and these at this day, like are you really leaning into AI ⁓ in all parts of the business, which we certainly are.
Keith Cline (33:53)
What’s ⁓ how are you leveraging AI just your in your own world as CEO of a company?
Ted Julian (33:57)
All the time. I a couple quick ones. Like Claude Design, man, that’s a cheat code. I don’t know if you’ve you really it kind of have to be a software company, I guess, to get the maximum bang for the buck. So for all you listeners out there, people watching, whatever, ⁓ if you’re in a startup like ⁓ and you’re using Claude, then that means that Claude already has exit has access to like your app and how it’s designed. Your fonts, color schemes, other treatments, all that stuff. So for marketing purposes.
Go to market purposes you can use claw design and you don’t have to do jack for it to already have all of that context so anything you want to do like sales deck update that ⁓ create actually we have this research survey come in we use this to generate an infographic off of this research survey and you basically will get perfectly branded materials that with like zero next to zero effort you know so that’s a biggie Claude Design like unbelievable that’s a that’s an easy hack
But another one I guess that comes to mind that I find helpful because we’re spending more time on partnerships, right? Like we’re at that stage now of looking at trying to expand our go-to-market by trying to create some partnerships and some synergy. And ⁓ here again, it’s all about context. Like I feed into Claude, you know, everything about our ICP, everything about our product. And then if I’m talking to a partner, I have it go research that partner and come up with like what’s the angle? What’s the story for how one plus one equals three? And it and it’s it’s AI, so it’s not perfect.
Perfect, but it gives me like it probably gets me 80% there at where what would have taken me hours, maybe days, to do that otherwise. And then I’m just like saying the shit that’s stupid and like cleaning up the stuff that’s good. and it usually does find some things that I just was unaware of that I can kind of weave into the narrative. So that’s a long way of saying, like figuring out the partnerships and synergy and just getting crisper quicker on how you can work with people. It is powerful, and I see.
It when I pitch, like I think what I see is like I’m talking to somebody much much bigger than Flux, and I’m engaging with them like a much much bigger company than we really are. Because in the first meeting, I’m not just talking about us, like I’ve already, like, and and making very specific connections as to why this thing that I believe so is so important is really important to them and how it fits into their strategy, or it’s a gap in their product portfolio, or it’s a go-to-market pain that they experience that we can.
Keith Cline (36:15)
Right.
Ted Julian (36:28)
Help solve.
Keith Cline (36:32)
What do you like to do for fun outside of work?
Ted Julian (36:35)
This gets to discipline and never giving up.
Keith Cline (36:39)
Yeah.
Ted Julian (36:41)
I’ve been doing like long course ⁓ endurance stuff for a long time. So I was a really serious distance runner for a long time and tried to get as fast as I possibly could. ⁓ in marathons in particular. so that defined me for like much of the last fifteen years. ⁓ but then I kind of ran my hip into the ground, had to replace that. So now I can’t do quite as much running, so I did a little bit more cycling. So that’s a big one, and then ⁓ I mean my kids are older, but I’m a dad and they’re still local, so I still see them all time and now you know our interactions are more around like them and their early stage careers ⁓ and stuff like that. But yeah, I guess that’s the other big part of w of me.
Keith Cline (37:25)
Cool. Well Ted, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your history, background, obviously all the great work you and your team are up to at Flux obviously all the great advice.
Ted Julian (37:33)
It’s really fun. It was my pleasure and it it’s a joy to be a part of this thing that I’ve been watching for a really long time. And I’m so glad we ran into one another, so we should keep it going.
