This week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and Sponsored.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Mitch Wainer: [12:22] I would say I was splitting time between both companies, both entities, but it really shifted when I dug into the market research… And this is a really funny story. Basically, I had a conversation with Ben and we were just kind of ideating on ways to find out how next generation businesses and startups are running their applications online. Are they leveraging virtual machines and virtual servers, or are they entirely on a manage dedicated machine?
So what I did is I basically bought a bunch of pizzas and I knocked on the doors of every single startup in Soho, the “Silicon alley of New York City”, and I asked the person at the front desk “Hey, can I spend 5-10 minutes with your head of engineering, CTO, VP of engineering, just to ask them a few questions about how their infrastructure is currently set up? In exchange, here’s a box of free pizza for your office and your team.”
So I would say I had probably around a 50%-60% success rate, getting just a quick conversation on the table with these VPs and the CTOs… Which was great. It was immediate validation that everyone was moving to the cloud. So I spoke to about 30 companies, so a lot of pizza… And every single company either had their entire production application and even staging environment all in the cloud, or they had a hybrid model of cloud and dedicated… But no one was purely dedicated, and Server Stack was a managed hosting company predominantly focused on managed, dedicated hosting. So I came back with all this insight and information. It wasn’t like an enormous dataset. There was only 30 conversations being had, but nonetheless, it was validating… So that was a point in time where I think the decision quickly shifted on where we actually focus our time and effort, like “How do we prioritize the business?”
There was obviously employees working at Server Stack and there was employees working at DigitalOcean, but I think slowly over time we started to shift the focus and shift the priorities of the business to focus on DigitalOcean… And we took a few swings and we placed a few bets along the way and we were slowly growing DigitalOcean, but it really wasn’t until we dropped the pricing of the lowest-tier server to $5 and doubled the RAM and doubled the hard drive space with SSD drives in the server, and we became pretty much the first cloud to offer SSD virtual machines online.