Impact Driven Development | Matt Klein (Envoy, bitdrift)

Software Misadventures

From creating Envoy to co-founding bitdrift to reimagine mobile observability, Matt joins the show to chat about being told to simply “write some proxy in Python” in the early days of building Envoy, early influences from building “shrink wrap” software at Microsoft, the process of spinning bitdrift out of Lyft, and much more.

Segments:

(00:03:10) Being a plumber on LinkedIn

(00:05:00) Early influences from building “shrink wrap” software at Microsoft

(00:10:44) Getting diverse work experiences

(00:16:36) Setting high standards for the team

(00:20:42) Lessons from failure of the first startup

(00:22:02) Building a successful open source project vs. running a startup

(00:25:25) Why not start a company around Envoy?

(00:29:54) Why not open source bitdrift?

(00:36:01) Mitigating the risk of big companies building in-house solutions

(00:38:16) Co-founding bitdrift to tackle mobile observability

(00:40:37) Applying lessons from the first startup failure

(00:44:14) Why mobile observability is so hard

(00:50:06) Open source vs source available

(00:53:33) The software licensing strugglebus

(00:58:03) How bitdrift was spinned out of Lyft

(01:03:36) Achieving work-life balance through leverage

(01:06:13) The early days of Envoy

(01:09:20) Impact driven development

(01:13:43) The crazy decision to build Envoy in retrospect

Show Notes:

• Matt’s blog posts on why mobile observability is a hard problem: https://mattklein123.dev/2024/04/24/no-one-talks-about-mobile-observability/

• The new company Matt is building: https://bitdrift.io/

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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en