Anish Dhar

What was interesting, though, about the MVP was we built it quickly. We had it while we were in Y Combinator. We kept iterating on it. We would get a lot of demos with people who understood the problem inherently, because when you speak about it with an engineer, universally, every engineer has experienced this pain of not understanding what services are out there and what exists.

What was interesting, though, about the MVP was we built it quickly. We had it while we were in Y Combinator. We kept iterating on it. We would get a lot of demos with people who understood the problem inherently, because when you speak about it with an engineer, universally, every engineer has experienced this pain of not understanding what services are out there and what exists.

And so we would get these demos, but it would never really translate to a sale. And so actually, it was pretty difficult, I'd say, the first year of the company, because We had this MVP. We knew that it was a problem because of our engineering backgrounds, but there was something missing there.

And so we would get these demos, but it would never really translate to a sale. And so actually, it was pretty difficult, I'd say, the first year of the company, because We had this MVP. We knew that it was a problem because of our engineering backgrounds, but there was something missing there.

And so we would get these demos, but it would never really translate to a sale. And so actually, it was pretty difficult, I'd say, the first year of the company, because We had this MVP. We knew that it was a problem because of our engineering backgrounds, but there was something missing there.

And it took the market maturing and our second iteration of the product with this added capability called scorecards to really hit this emotional pain that led to people buying Cortex. And so that was an interesting learning that we had.

And it took the market maturing and our second iteration of the product with this added capability called scorecards to really hit this emotional pain that led to people buying Cortex. And so that was an interesting learning that we had.

And it took the market maturing and our second iteration of the product with this added capability called scorecards to really hit this emotional pain that led to people buying Cortex. And so that was an interesting learning that we had.

There were a bunch, honestly, that were very pivotal in the early days that actually ended up being competitive advantages down the road. One of them, for example, was basically, hey, should we invest early in on-prem? On-prem infrastructure is a requirement for a lot of large enterprises because the way Cortex works is we integrate with a lot of different tooling.

There were a bunch, honestly, that were very pivotal in the early days that actually ended up being competitive advantages down the road. One of them, for example, was basically, hey, should we invest early in on-prem? On-prem infrastructure is a requirement for a lot of large enterprises because the way Cortex works is we integrate with a lot of different tooling.

There were a bunch, honestly, that were very pivotal in the early days that actually ended up being competitive advantages down the road. One of them, for example, was basically, hey, should we invest early in on-prem? On-prem infrastructure is a requirement for a lot of large enterprises because the way Cortex works is we integrate with a lot of different tooling.

For example, we need to connect with your GitHub or GitLab account. And that means we can process the code or read information from those repos, which is important because then you want engineers to be able to access that in the catalog experience. And so our first customer was this company called 8x8, and they had very strict security requirements.

For example, we need to connect with your GitHub or GitLab account. And that means we can process the code or read information from those repos, which is important because then you want engineers to be able to access that in the catalog experience. And so our first customer was this company called 8x8, and they had very strict security requirements.

For example, we need to connect with your GitHub or GitLab account. And that means we can process the code or read information from those repos, which is important because then you want engineers to be able to access that in the catalog experience. And so our first customer was this company called 8x8, and they had very strict security requirements.

And so they said, the only way we can use your product is if you give it to us in some sort of on-prem package. So for example, like a helm chart that we can deploy in our own internal AWS account in Kubernetes. But it's completely air-gapped, meaning us at Cortex can't access the product or get any information. It's a lot harder to debug versus obviously just using the SaaS cloud offering.

And so they said, the only way we can use your product is if you give it to us in some sort of on-prem package. So for example, like a helm chart that we can deploy in our own internal AWS account in Kubernetes. But it's completely air-gapped, meaning us at Cortex can't access the product or get any information. It's a lot harder to debug versus obviously just using the SaaS cloud offering.

And so they said, the only way we can use your product is if you give it to us in some sort of on-prem package. So for example, like a helm chart that we can deploy in our own internal AWS account in Kubernetes. But it's completely air-gapped, meaning us at Cortex can't access the product or get any information. It's a lot harder to debug versus obviously just using the SaaS cloud offering.

A lot of the advice we got at that point was don't accept that, like, stick with SaaS. You'll be able to iterate more quickly. You don't know what will happen over time as you have to support now this on-prem and cloud. But we decided to go and invest in on-prem anyway, and we did that very early.

A lot of the advice we got at that point was don't accept that, like, stick with SaaS. You'll be able to iterate more quickly. You don't know what will happen over time as you have to support now this on-prem and cloud. But we decided to go and invest in on-prem anyway, and we did that very early.

A lot of the advice we got at that point was don't accept that, like, stick with SaaS. You'll be able to iterate more quickly. You don't know what will happen over time as you have to support now this on-prem and cloud. But we decided to go and invest in on-prem anyway, and we did that very early.