I'm Mo, one of the founders and the CEO of Codeship. I spend most of my day working with our team on helping our customers ship code more often. Feel free to ask me anything about building a developer tool company, all the different aspects of running a startup, culture/leadership, Continuous Integration/Delivery.
Codeship started out in Austria (where I grew up) and I moved to the US 4-5 years ago. Over time, we transitioned into a remote first company and the majority of our team is working remotely now. It took us a while to figure that out and I'm happy to share as many learnings as you want from our journey.
When I'm not thinking about Codeship, I try to spend as much time as possible outdoors, rock climbing, running, skiing, hiking - you name it. That plus my love for chess and sleeping pretty much makes up my days ;)
Latest comments (56)
Do you have any opening for interns ?
Not right now but please look at our jobs page again early next year - it could change.
Just wanted to thank you for the product. It's my go to tool for our Heroku based apps and it rocks!
Thank you 😊
Why don't you openly acknowledge that you are a bot?
I'm not a bot.
How might you convince someone that using a CI system is advantageous no matter how small the project is? Context: I'm a student trying to get my peers into using CI systems for homework assignments and smaller projects, as I think it's not only an important concept but makes running tests a lot easier.
I think so. You get used to the workflow and it saves you time. Even if you don't write any tests and are just working on a tiny Lambda function, having the deployment configured once and triggering it automatically when pushed to / merged into master is super helpful in my opinion.
Btw. students can use Codeship for free.
How do you evaluate raises and pay for your employees? Do you have a system in place or a merit system based on starting salary?
There are a couple of factors, and I will structure it into two buckets, new employees & existing employees.
New employees: Usually, the job description defines clearly what title a person would get, what seniority we are looking for and that then is used as an input factor for some market research to determine what the market value for such a position is. That's a bit hard when you are hiring in multiple different countries/regions. Then there's what a new employee expects from us. That's important as well (we on purpose don't ask what people are making right now; it's solely about what they expect to make once they work for us).
Existing employees: We focus a lot on performance and historically, most compensation increases were merit-based.
With that all being said, we are currently working on a project internally to better formalizing all of that and also clearly spelling out that it's not all merit-based. E.g., we don't want to punish somebody who is performing well in a current role, doesn't want to get promoted, doesn't want to take on more responsibility but is extremely valuable for us and has acquired a lot of Codeship-specific knowledge. That's one example where we would want to have a system in place that rewards that person too.
TL;DR: Starting compensation (base/bonus/equity) gets determined by the market value (different per location), and afterward it's merit-based with some exceptions.
I think that's a duplicate: dev.to/moritzplassnig/im-the-found...
What is the most important aspect for a startup to be successful— is it money, time, people, idea or something else?
How did you come up with the “continuous integration and delivery method" (is it similar to agile?) and brought the value into the company’s working culture. What is the advantage of this?
What is your biggest advice for the new startup founders?
@1: People, first and foremost. Great people figure out a real problem and a solution for it and the rest (selling the product, etc.). I think the timing is the most underappreciated aspect of building a startup. It's unfortunately also something that you can't control.
@2: I/we didn't come up with it. There are a lot of smarter people who covered this topic before us, e.g., martinfowler.com/articles/continuo...
What we believed in when we started is that that methodology will become the mainstream and that companies need dedicated products like Codeship to apply the methodology properly.
The advantage is that you continuously test every code change and get every code change to a deployable state. That allows you to release a new version far more frequently, ideally in a fully automated manner through a platform like Codeship.
If you do that consistently, your software, your products will become better and better for your customers faster.
@3: Find great co-founders, think big and always put the customer first.
I'm always interested in entrepreneurship, but the thought of failure (not having enough money to feed my dog 😭) and not knowing where to start have always given me pause. What advice would you have for someone looking to start a business of their own?
Also, If you weren't the CEO of Codeship, what do you think you'd be doing now (and where)? :D
It's hard; I won't lie. The first half of our journey, I didn't make any $ of Codeship. I have a tremendous amount of respect for every founder who believes in a crazy idea and jumps right into it.
I think it depends on your situation. We didn't do Codeship full-time until we acquired our first couple of customers. We hedged our risk a bit. Once it was more obvious that what we do can be "real, " and other people are willing to pay for it, we went all-in. Maybe you could do the same? Maybe there are some ways how you could validate your idea on the side, make some progress to de-risk everything?
I don't know what would have happened if I wouldn't have started Codeship. Honestly, no idea (maybe I'm not creative enough). I hope something else that's pretty awesome would have happened ;) If I would do something different now, it would probably be in the same industry (dev tools), either doing a different startup or working for an interesting company.
Great questions
That was awesome & a lot of fun for me :)
What's your day-to-day like as CEO? Do you get to code?
Only for fun on the weekend.
Working on any side projects??
Nothing real cause I want to stay focused on Codeship.
I recently played around with k8s for fun and before that build some stuff for fun on top of AWS API Gateway/Lambda/MachineLearning but nothing that would make sense to productize.
Maybe sounds boring but that's okay and necessary if you decide to build a company because I think you need an incredible focus and have to give up some things to get to that.
What did you do before Codeship? Where would you say your journey to continuous integration began? :D Thanks for doing this AMA btw!
I went to school in Austria, did a lot of programming until I was 19. Then I thought I should see "the other side" and studied business. Stopped with that I think when I was around 20/21 and started working on a project called "STARTeurope" where we tried to bring devs, designers + biz people together in Austria to work on projects (similar to Startup Weekend and other hackathons). That's where I met one of my co-founders, and we started talking about Codeship.
Since I wanted to do something more technical again, Codeship was perfect. That being said, being honest here, in the beginning, a lot of my interest also came from me hoping to get back to programming more again which never really happened due to my current role at Codeship.
Looking back, I've to admit that it's probably better that I'm doing what I'm doing and that I'm not in a hands-on technical position (there are simply far better people at Codeship for that).
Hey, how can I use codeship, I know it's weird but I want to explain it to my team in more simplest way possible, what is it, is it something like GoDaddy or something like GitHub?
That's awesome! It's great that you've gotten to see multiple sides of the business.