Taloflow with LV Jadavji - Find the best dev and cloud tools for your use case 10x faster (as All Schemes Considered)
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Podcast Notes
Episode 11: Taloflow with CEO LV Jadavji - Find the best dev and cloud tools for your use case 10x faster
Aakash interviews Taloflow (https://www.taloflow.ai) CEO LV Jadavji (https://twitter.com/legendarylvj). Part of YC W21 - Taloflow analyzes data about your cloud architecture and business requirements to match you with cloud tooling that best fits your use case. LV shares deep insight about the cloud computing space. He details the Cambrian explosion, the rise of the niche solution, and the pains felt by buyers of cloud computing software.
LV Jadavji on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LegendaryLVJ
LV Jadavji on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ljadavji/
Taloflow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TaloHQ
Contact:
Email: allschemesconsidered@aakash.io
Twitter: @aakashdotio [https://www.twitter.com/aakashdotio]
Music credits:
Syn Cole - Gizmo [NCS Release] provided by NoCopyrightSounds.
Autogenerated Transcript
Aakash Shah: [00:00:00] Welcome to All Schemes Considered, the weekly podcast where we dive deep on a startup and examine its viability as a business. It's a startup case study in about 25 minutes. I'm your host, Aakash Shah.
I am so excited to introduce our guests this week. LV Jadavji CEO of Taloflow. A serial entrepreneur. He's currently going through Y Combinator as part of the winter 2021 batch. His company Taloflow matches developers to the best cloud product for their use case. Let's get right into it.
Welcome to the show, LV. How are you doing today
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:00:43] Doing Great, thank you. Aakash
Aakash Shah: [00:00:44] is there anything you want to share with the listeners about your background?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:00:47] Yes. So I've been entrepreneurial for pretty much my whole life since I've been 18.
I started in nutrition then natural gas compressors got really deep into 3d printing, had a venture backed startup in 3d printing, 3d printing orthotics , and became quite passionate about developer tools along the way. And now I'm building a business to help developers to make their lives easier when it comes to buying cloud tools.
Aakash Shah: [00:01:11] Wow. That's quite a breadth of entrepreneurial activities across a large number of industries. Tell me what's the name of your company?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:01:18] My company's name is Taloflow
Aakash Shah: [00:01:20] could you dig into more what you guys are doing?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:01:23] Of course. So I love to kind of jump into the fact that we went through several pivots to get here.
And there were a few insights along the way that got us here. So generally speaking, we started in the no-code space back in 2018, then pivoted to cloud management, which was basically optimizing AWS bills for our customers and about I would say. six Seven months ago, we started noticing a very interesting pattern among our customers.
They were using many tools outside of AWS
and were struggling to pick which kinds of tools were best for the use case. And so we saw the. Product organization and an infrastructure for all these cloud native companies, basically shifting away from, you know, the bundled up experience of AWS or GCP or Azure, and really an unbundling happening where people were looking to use best in cloud services, across clouds.
And so that got us to this insight, which is that it's really hard to find which cloud tools are the right ones to use because every decision is very use case driven. You can't just work off a G2 report or Gartner report to find out what's right for your use case
in the world of cloud tooling. And so Taloflow helps developers find the best developer and cloud tools for their use case about 10 times faster.
We do that by analyzing cloud infrastructure data. Architecture data, business requirements to mesh developers to the best dev or cloud tool for their use case.
And really automate what is usually a long arduous process of making off tools, comparing vendors, negotiating pricing
which can be very error prone as well for engineering teams.
Aakash Shah: [00:02:54] I just think of my background in software engineering when I had to make the sort of developer tooling decision. And it sounds like Taloflow would have made my life a lot, a lot easier. Why don't you dig into the, into that pain point and into the customer?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:03:09] So this initially started with I think people were talking about multicloud a couple of years ago, let's say two or three years ago as a, you know, blue-sky idea that we were going to run workloads agnostically across cloud providers.
But I think that that idea of multicloud was mistaken. And what we saw happening instead is that people were looking for best in-class providers or solutions for specific workloads. So rather than let's say making my compute or my storage entirely agnostic, I'm going to pick the right storage provider or compute provider APM tool for my business.
And so that's really the path people are headed towards. And, and what's really interesting about the journey is that there's been such activity in the funding environment for cloud tools. There's I would call it a Cambrian explosion in cloud tooling.
You know, if you look at. AWS, you know five years ago or you know, its market share was easily 45%. I think now it's closer to 31%. So even, you know, relative to the overall size of the cloud market, AWS is market share is shrinking because it's just growing so much because of this Cambrian explosion and, and you see a lot of alternatives, you know, from. Wasabi and storage to snowflake and data stores to Databricks, to Mongo DB.
I mean, there's many options out there perform specific tasks and people just need to find the right one for the tool. And. And then the more complexity and options that are in the market, the more analysis is required. And that's the fortunate and unfortunate fact that powers the insight behind AWS .
Aakash Shah: [00:04:43] There are a lot more entrants into this space, but the size of the market has probably. Doubled tripled in the past five years?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:04:49] You know, at least 80 to 90% of workloads are still on premises. And I think many more of those will move to cloud. When this is all said and done, I think I, you know, between 2030 and 2035 you know cloud will be a trillion dollar market.
Aakash Shah: [00:05:04] Yeah, I would totally agree with that. So I think you said something really interesting there, you know, I think when people think of cloud providers, a lot of times they're familiar with Amazon web services, AWS or Google cloud platform, which is GCP or even Microsoft's offering, which is Microsoft Azure.
, you know, you almost alluded to in this Cambrian explosion, there's many, many, many other players that aren't trying to do everything for everyone, which these large platforms are trying to do, but have these very specialized offerings built primarily around excelling in a singular. Niche
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:05:39] Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's interesting because there's a market can take different paths as it matures. And the cloud market is not consolidating like, , people sometimes expected at what. It's actually really diversifying and becoming specialized. So niche is definitely the right word to use.
People are specializing and, and even AWS, you know, when we did an internal assessment as to, you know, what things it, AWS is good at the roughly 150 products at offers it's maybe best in class at eight. So that's a lot of opportunity for other companies to to tackle.
Aakash Shah: [00:06:11] Right. who is making these decisions?
Is it a engineering lead? Is it a VP of engineering? I'm thinking about who your customers are and who who's making these decisions and who needs Taloflow's help the most? What do they look like?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:06:26] Good question. I mean it depends on the size and type of customer, but we're very focused on the. Digital native slash cloud native customer, like your typical Y Combinator company or alumnus that's, you know, maybe raised a seed series a or series B. We're looking at companies who need to make architectural changes or decisions to enable scale.
And so at that inflection point, we're usually engaging with, you know, the head of infrastructure maybe the manager of a development team for a specific product within an org. But more often than not the CTO you know, at the seed stage where let's say you're a YC company and you've been running on Firebase, and then, , you're done with your MVP and.
You need something better. You know, what database are you going to use? That's a very complex question to answer and we're there to help with that.
Aakash Shah: [00:07:14] Yeah. Actually I love that example that you gave, because it sounds so innocent. What database are you going to use, but can you dig into the other considerations or decisions that have to be made just so that you can answer what database you're going to use?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:07:29] I mean, I will, I'll say there's four buckets for virtually any cloud product. Use as high-level dimensions for making a decision. Number one is cost, right? So, you know, you might have specific requirements around cost and want to optimize it on cost and find that efficient frontier. The second bucket is obviously quite important nowadays is compliance.
Right. And what industries are you're operating is FINRA HIPPA or something like that important to you. So you have compliance as another dimension. Third dimension would actually be. Performance, right? So you want to be able to compare for your specific type of workload or use case how performant is a solution. And cloud vendors are notorious for basically pushing benchmarks about their performance that are where they, they cherry pick use cases where they perform well, but no one is really you know, coming in and saying, "well, For your specific use case, this is the vendor that performs the best" and kind of doing that analysis.
And then the fourth is quite interesting. is actually regions and capacity, right? I think there's very few players out there that are like auditing the historical performance or actual capacity of different cloud providers.
If you recall, in the peak of COVID Azure could not meet demand. So lots of services weren't running properly. And you know, some cloud providers are notorious for expanding into different regions, but not really having the capacity they say they do. And so that's another effect of there not being a third party to kind of audit and verify all these claims and help people sift through all the research they have to do.
Aakash Shah: [00:09:00] I really like how you're effectively calling out these cloud vendors for, being good at marketing and promoting what's really good about themselves without helping purchasers make the best decisions.
Right?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:09:12] what's really problematic for developers because as you know, developers by nature are. You know, very sophisticated and they don't like the marketing BS. And so that's why there's, I think a lot of thirst for something like this because you're not gonna trust these, claims made by the selling party
Aakash Shah: [00:09:29] Yeah. I mean, marketing to developers, selling to developers while you can build very, very successful businesses is very difficult because I like to think of developers as very discerning customers , if you're selling a product that they're going to build their services on and you make them stay up extra late because something went down and it's not because of them.
They are going to remember that for the next five, 10 years. Yeah. And I can say that because I've done that, you know, it's been five years and here I am complaining about it still,
but you don't want to do that no company ever wants to create that experience, and word of mouth super, super important.
Okay. So. You know, I've done this sort of database transition before, and we were strategic about it.
We picked three different providers. We did a three month pilot with each of them. It costs money. It was a headache to manage. And then at the end of the day, We were kind of happy with the technology we chose. is that, is that story, something that resonates with you? Is this what people come to you with as their, you know, "this is what life was like before Taloflow."
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:10:34] Yeah. I mean, who has three months? to focus on researching products , I like to think of it as, you know, what, what can we do to get you back to coding? Instead of baking off tools there's so many horror stories we've had this internally before we pivoted to this space where, you know, we picked different types of products for mission critical parts of our business and in production, they, they were awful. And there were all kinds of gotchas we'd wished we had known about.
Aakash Shah: [00:10:58] you know, what I'm really hearing is that people who are making these technical decisions the engineers, the CTOs, they're making it with not the best information, not complete information.
They're making it, knowing that if they make the wrong decision, it's going to provide even more headaches within a few months, at least in a year and a half probably. And they're afraid, honestly, because. Yes, they don't want to make a decision. That's going to increase the technical debt.
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:11:29] Exactly. So the way we frame it as that, this is a market where there's both tremendous asymmetry of information and tremendous complexity of information. And it's this huge growing market and there's definitely a lot of pain associated with making the wrong decision, but there's so much appeal to wanting to make a decision that's not the safe one. Right. Because you know, you could default and say, I'm going to use AWS for everything. But you know, even now we're even seeing that within AWS, it's hard to pick which tool, because there's so much overlap, right. If you would still, you know, cloud to, you know, three basic things, you know, network.
Storage compute. I mean how many different types of compute does AWS offer, what are you going to pick? Like even within AWS, you're baking off tools. so it's, it's a yeah, I think it's a very real pain point
.
Aakash Shah: [00:12:20] We've talked about the frustrations that go along with this process that CTO's are doing, you know, I'm a CTO.
I find Taloflow. How does Taloflow change my life? Once I start talking to you guys.
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:12:31] So The, the first thing is you obviously might have a type of product in mind that you want to buy. Right? It's some kind of business requirement when you approach Taloflow I mean there's concierge service, you know, for many of these things I'm about to mention, but.
Basically the first thing we do is we, we walk you through a questionnaire that is extremely complex on the backend and has been actually designed with you know, field experts in different product categories. So for example, if you wanted to buy an object storage product, I mean, we work with a lot of experts and vendors to actually figure out what are the right types of questions to ask them, to find the use case?
we kind of ask all those questions that get us to understand, you know, what are all the requirements you have. And then we take it a step further and actually ask you to connect us to your existing cloud accounts. So if you have let's say an existing AWS account or GCP account, we'll ask you to connect us to that.
And we will ingest the usage history and records from those accounts and and run our data science on it to actually identify. And also cast cost performance from one provider to another. So you can, let's say map out, let's say your entire AWS bill, as an example, , so that kind of experience allows you to do multiple things.
One is like I mentioned before understand from a compliance risk framework are you okay? Understand from a feature requirement framework , are you okay? And then we automatically categorize you into a use case based on the usage history we ingest and the responses you give. And so using that categorization, we will show you the benchmarks that are relevant to you for your use case so that you're not looking at a bunch of noise.
So let's say you have a very data science, intense workload. We will show you the benchmarks that are relevant for that specific product for that kind of workload. And then finally on the cost and usage issue you get a very accurate picture of the ROI, the TCO, the payback period migration engineering costs and of course the cost benefit of choosing one solution over the other. And so you're basically seeing all the options that are relevant to you. Side-by-side
Aakash Shah: [00:14:42] wow. That sounds incredible. I wish I could use Taloflow flow for all the purchasing decisions in my life, So just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, not only do you.
Work with the customer to make sure you deeply understand their use case and what's going to be important for them going forward. But you also plug into their current providers and get that data and analyze that data to, create forecasts of different outcomes.
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:15:13] And the reason why that's so important is because people tend to have a cloud provider of record, right?
Like they're either using AWS, GCP, or Azure. Most of the time when we talk to these digital native companies and when they're using tools, you know, they expect it to communicate with one of those three. But unless you deeply understand the usage, statistics and usage patterns on those big three cloud providers, you're going to miss potentially a lot of gotchas or you know, important things.
So if I picked you know, provider externally from AWS and it was communicating with AWS constantly, there's a lot of egress fees and data transfer to model out and figure out you might think that a particular solution is cheaper for example, but when you factor in all the egress fees, that might be much more expensive.
Wouldn't you like the certainty that did this? You're about to make accounts for all those data transfer charges.
Aakash Shah: [00:16:00] . That is incredible. .
it really sounds like Taloflow is on the customer's side and being an advocate for the customer and helping the customer understand a comprehensive picture of what adopting a certain cloud provider would do. Even down to these little details that are often missed by developers and technical experts, because. You know, their job is to be experts in their domain. Not necessarily be experts in the intricacies of Google cloud platform versus Amazon web services versus Azure versus whatever.
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:16:30] Exactly. Yeah. And like, even if at the end of the day, people still want to test tools before they put them in production. I mean, I expect that to be the case for a long time. But like, at least we help you whittled down the list to the one or two you should test, right? Like really quickly.
I mean, cause there's a universe of providers out there that has really extensive, you know we see this as you know, on the YC chats all the time or, internal forums where like, there is so much. Deliberation on, on, on the, on the different options available when people have a use case that they define and record, if they did find it, it'd be nice to just say, you know, these, this is the one you should test, and this is maybe number two.
And, and we expect the results to be X and Y but, but yeah, even, even getting to that point and filtering the options for developers can save a whole lot of time.
Aakash Shah: [00:17:17] It sounds like you can turn a two month purchasing decision into a two week decision
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:17:23] that's about right.
Aakash Shah: [00:17:24] Yep. Oh dude. That's magical.
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:17:26] we plan to do this is not something we do like fully automated today, but we do obviously communicate with cloud vendors as well of all kinds of different product categories , and they have private pricing And, you know, sometimes , we could like anonymously say like, "Hey, someone has this kind of usage pattern and requirements and you know, like they they're interested in your solution you know can you do better?"
Right. So we're trying to be an advocate for the cloud buyer as much as we can. And, and and over time also building up a knowledge base of, of kind of the, the private pricing and deals available to different types of use cases and customers.
Aakash Shah: [00:17:58] Absolutely. And then once I, you know, once I'm working with Taloflow, once you guys have provided me this incredible experience are there any ongoing services or is it a.
One time engagement.
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:18:10] It's not one time because we focus very much on the digital native company who are extremely active in buying new cloud products. And once we're connected to your cloud accounts we can actually keep recommending products over time. Right. So you might not be actively looking for something, but we may, might be able to point something out.
Where you might get a new efficiency or better performance, and you might want to look at it. So because you know, along your journey as a cloud company, I'm sure there's going to be. You know between your, your seed round and your IPO, there's going to be, you know, 50 to 100 different cloud tooling decisions you're going to make.
Right? So along that journey, we'll want to be proactive and recommending tools and as much as possible we would give you the option to, to keep us connected to your cloud accounts. So we can keep ingesting some data and recommending tools over time, and also pointing out to inefficiencies where they can be.
Aakash Shah: [00:18:58] I love that idea because for me, in my experience, it always ended up being a very reactive thing. When it came to improving our cloud tooling, either we were reaching scaling performance, or we, we were reaching exorbitant costs and only then did we turn around and. Start looking for providers, but that's not the best mindset to be in, you know, to be shopping for a new solution.
When you're on a incredible deadline like that, such as you're hitting your scaling limits or your performance limits or, or the end of your bank account. I think being reactive is something that's definitely come up very often in this sort of developer tooling space.
You guys have a few customers now you're a startup let's fast forward, five years you have a hundred million dollars in revenue. What does the Taloflow company and Taloflow product look like?
You know what's the world look like for Taloflow in five years
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:19:54] in five years we are the defacto aggregator of demand for cloud. So all cloud buying decisions are made through us. We have the most cloud usage data in the world.
And and because of that, we are the most powerful player in cloud. So as you can imagine that usage data we are collecting for our customers You know is extremely valuable. It's, it's it's competitive, it's pricing, it's performance intelligence that is, is hugely valuable in building products building on marketing strategies and so on and so forth.
And it's also really valuable in terms of helping our cloud buyers optimize their cloud stack. Because at some point that data can be used to, to help people rearrange their stack in the most efficient ways. So it's not, it's no longer just about, Hey, pick this cloud tool for this specific use case.
It's more about if you're going to implement this cloud tool, here's the most efficient way to implement it. Or the fastest way to implement it. So when we have all those, all this history of how people buy cloud tools, how they implemented and the before and after, because we have a full loop there's a lot of learning we can do on that to become even more intelligent with the recommendations and also offer a whole new dimension in terms of the service, which is again, these, these very in depth stack reviews per se.
Aakash Shah: [00:21:14] That sounds like a beautiful feature because there really isn't anyone providing this sort of industry level guidance from a cloud buyer perspective
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:21:22] yeah. I mean, as you can imagine, let's say I buy snowflake. Right. Then what, like, how do I implement snowflake? Like, like how should I configure snowflake? Like in the most perfect way possible for my needs? That's, that's, that's the extent of, of where we want to more
Aakash Shah: [00:21:38] cloud buyers.
I can't wait for that to be the future. And I hope that our companies can grow up together so that I can continue pushing off all my cloud buying decisions on to Ta loflow Well, LV, this has been an incredible conversation. I've really enjoyed learning about Taloflow.
Is there anything else you want to share with the audience?
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:21:58] Sure. So, I mean, we're very much aligned with cloud buyers in terms of facilitating that journey of picking in your cloud product or your next few cloud products. We're knee deep in working with digital native companies. So if you're a startup at seed series, a series B and so on we really want to help you pick the right tool for whatever use case you have.
We are extending anyone who's listening to this podcast, a. And, and reaches out to us a free stack review where we're look at your entire stack with you. And and then any specific use cases you might have with regards to our cloud, till you want to buy, let's say you want to buy an APM or a log management tool or a new object storage provider.
We will do the research for you for that specific use case and give you access to our tool to get the full. ROI payback and other kinds of analysis done. So full access to the Taloflow service for our specific cloud product is available to you.
Aakash Shah: [00:22:55] And what's the best way for them to reach you
Louis-Victor Jadavji: [00:22:57] the best way to reach us would be to email me directly at Loui s spelled L O U I S at taloflow.ai.
Aakash Shah: [00:23:05] Wonderful.
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