I’ve been in a creative rut for the last few months, but I recently started a new job at Temporal and I finally have my writing mojo back! Thanks for sticking around.
I would be remiss not to share my appreciation for my time at Google. Understanding Borg and its role in creating best in-class compute infrastructure was a privilege. The unfettered access to experts and scholars in the field of distributed systems was humbling and inspiring. Google has opened doors for me and I will always be grateful.
Friends and colleagues have asked how I made the decision to join Temporal. There were several factors that went into it — some personal and some company specific.
On the personal front, I wanted to optimize for growth and learning above all. I knew I wanted to work at a smaller company (<500 employees). I wanted to stay in the infrastructure and developer space. As a visa-holder, I had a certain amount of risk I was able to stomach measured by company stage and runway. Finally, while I was willing to take a hit on liquid compensation (almost inevitable leaving Google), I had to find a salary range that I still felt comfortable with.
On the company front, Temporal really stood out to me on four key fronts (inspired by Julia Schottenstein’s framework).
Market: Temporal pioneered an entirely new category of durable execution. There are now a litany of companies solving this problem for microservice based architectures. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was nuts; after Temporal was on my radar, I started seeing workflow based startups everywhere. a16z wrote about The Modern Transactional Stack and while I’m more bullish than they are about Temporal’s potential (duh), I think they did an excellent job of mapping the space. Suffice to say, by virtue of Temporal’s position in the tech stack, there is so much room to grow and expand, on top of what is already a significantly large TAM. swyx alludes to this in his post The $100b Bull Case for Temporal.
People: The founders Maxim and Samar have previously worked on Cadence at Uber and Simple Workflow (SWF) at AWS. They’ve devoted their careers to this space, and as a result they understand the users of Temporal deeply and their technical knowhow is second to none. The caliber of people that Temporal has attracted across various functions was also really impressive. I also appreciated the culture of transparency even through the interview process and the humility that the team embodied. Personally I find it a bit disingenuous when a startup prematurely claims that they’ve won the market. I’d rather err on the side of caution on this one so in that sense, my values felt aligned with Temporal.
Product: Temporal meets developers where they are with SDKs in multiple languages. The semantics that Temporal introduces like activities, workflows, workers, and signals among others also feel really intuitive. Temporal Cloud is cheaper and far more reliable than self-hosting Temporal. While there is a learning curve to using Temporal, the value that the product brings to its users was clear to me even as an outsider looking in. This visibility was in large part due to the core product being open-source, which brings me to arguably my most important point.
Distribution: Being OSS isn’t automatically a road to success. In Temporal’s case, building openly in the community has attracted a large contingent of developers who are truly passionate about adopting and using the product. The engagement and activity in the community Slack and forums was evident. I’m also a bigger fan of the more natural “land and expand” strategy (Temporal OSS to Temporal Cloud) as opposed to the open-core monetization model. Converting users to paying customers is going to be the key challenge, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, Temporal is on the right track.
Lastly, I would be lying if I said this didn’t cross my mind but I love the name Temporal and the company branding is *chef’s kiss*. I’m optimistic and excited about Temporal’s future and my role in it!
