Omry Hay

We want to do infrastructure as code platform and not Terraform platform management. So we went on and built that and I think I don't know, maybe 30, 40% of our customers right now are using Terragrunt within the platform. And then we went to deploy more stuff and using more frameworks like Pulumi and CloudFormation and Helm. And I think that was like the first time that we heard it.

We want to do infrastructure as code platform and not Terraform platform management. So we went on and built that and I think I don't know, maybe 30, 40% of our customers right now are using Terragrunt within the platform. And then we went to deploy more stuff and using more frameworks like Pulumi and CloudFormation and Helm. And I think that was like the first time that we heard it.

We said, okay, there's a lot of traction here. We need to go and build it. And it's aligned with our vision to be multi-framework. So that's how we prioritize that over other stuff.

We said, okay, there's a lot of traction here. We need to go and build it. And it's aligned with our vision to be multi-framework. So that's how we prioritize that over other stuff.

Zohad led this project in order to make this thing more efficient, and we started involving me into this process, and we started building something internally. My name is Zomri Chai. I'm co-founder and CDO at Mzero.

Zohad led this project in order to make this thing more efficient, and we started involving me into this process, and we started building something internally. My name is Zomri Chai. I'm co-founder and CDO at Mzero.

Team and people is the most important piece of a company. And what we ended up doing, like firstly in the R&D, we didn't have teams, we didn't have, and we still don't have like teams and we don't have a single ownership. We don't have a front end team and a back end team.

Team and people is the most important piece of a company. And what we ended up doing, like firstly in the R&D, we didn't have teams, we didn't have, and we still don't have like teams and we don't have a single ownership. We don't have a front end team and a back end team.

and everybody's doing everything and we looked for very versatile people at first because you need people you know to do not their specific job but a lot of stuff around that because you're a small startup you don't have like tens or ten thousand people around you So you need people to not only do their specific job, but also do stuff that you don't have people to do that.

and everybody's doing everything and we looked for very versatile people at first because you need people you know to do not their specific job but a lot of stuff around that because you're a small startup you don't have like tens or ten thousand people around you So you need people to not only do their specific job, but also do stuff that you don't have people to do that.

You need like engineers doing stuff that you usually don't get a lot of engineers doing. For example, if it's like blog posts and bargaining stuff, and maybe support. So we look for people that are versatile, that can help us grow and be in the position in order to grow themselves within the company as we scale.

You need like engineers doing stuff that you usually don't get a lot of engineers doing. For example, if it's like blog posts and bargaining stuff, and maybe support. So we look for people that are versatile, that can help us grow and be in the position in order to grow themselves within the company as we scale.

So I think there's two terms of scale when you talk about the company. One is the application and the tech, and the other one is the team itself. And I think for the application part, as we're using mostly serverless and mostly AWS, most of the things that we did were scalable by nature. As I mentioned, we used Lambdas, and Lambda can furtherly scale as much as you want.

So I think there's two terms of scale when you talk about the company. One is the application and the tech, and the other one is the team itself. And I think for the application part, as we're using mostly serverless and mostly AWS, most of the things that we did were scalable by nature. As I mentioned, we used Lambdas, and Lambda can furtherly scale as much as you want.

But then again, you have to tweak that a little bit. So Lambdas, for example, had a cold start and there's a lot of stuff around it in order to manage that in large scale that you needed to do. And there are a lot of features that weren't around when we started that helped you with that.

But then again, you have to tweak that a little bit. So Lambdas, for example, had a cold start and there's a lot of stuff around it in order to manage that in large scale that you needed to do. And there are a lot of features that weren't around when we started that helped you with that.

But overall, our thinking was how that scales both in terms of the application, both in terms of the infrastructure and the database. But sometimes you take some product or technical debt that you say, hey, nobody will reach a thousand or two thousand of something, but it ends up surprising you.

But overall, our thinking was how that scales both in terms of the application, both in terms of the infrastructure and the database. But sometimes you take some product or technical debt that you say, hey, nobody will reach a thousand or two thousand of something, but it ends up surprising you.

And then you need to scale also how the UX or the front end is acting because you didn't anticipate that. So those are the places that we sometimes struggled. So that's, in terms of the application part, we relied mostly around what AWS has to offer and how you build on top of that. You are basically saying they will take care of a scale.

And then you need to scale also how the UX or the front end is acting because you didn't anticipate that. So those are the places that we sometimes struggled. So that's, in terms of the application part, we relied mostly around what AWS has to offer and how you build on top of that. You are basically saying they will take care of a scale.

We just need to tweak a few things here and there in order to make it work. In terms of the team, we've talked about how you grow that over time. And I think we did it over time. We said, okay, this will work up until 10 people, 20 people, but as you scaled, it won't work. But for now it's working as well as we need it to be.

We just need to tweak a few things here and there in order to make it work. In terms of the team, we've talked about how you grow that over time. And I think we did it over time. We said, okay, this will work up until 10 people, 20 people, but as you scaled, it won't work. But for now it's working as well as we need it to be.

And then once we hit that wall or saw a lot of issues or problems, we fixed that along the way with the team building.

And then once we hit that wall or saw a lot of issues or problems, we fixed that along the way with the team building.

One is the team that we've talked about. As I mentioned, I think the most important thing in a company is the people around it. There's no such thing as a company without the people around it. As you said, I say we a lot because it's not only me. It's not like me and Ohad built that company. The people around us and the team built that. And that's something I took a lot of pride in.

One is the team that we've talked about. As I mentioned, I think the most important thing in a company is the people around it. There's no such thing as a company without the people around it. As you said, I say we a lot because it's not only me. It's not like me and Ohad built that company. The people around us and the team built that. And that's something I took a lot of pride in.

And the other thing is more around the product.

And the other thing is more around the product.

For me seeing somebody that is using the platform and making the most out of it and getting value out of the product that I took part of building something that I take proud in because it's like you build something from scratch and now you have so many users, so many customers, so many people enjoying that and the feedback that you get sometimes it's bad but most of the time it's good.

For me seeing somebody that is using the platform and making the most out of it and getting value out of the product that I took part of building something that I take proud in because it's like you build something from scratch and now you have so many users, so many customers, so many people enjoying that and the feedback that you get sometimes it's bad but most of the time it's good.

It's something that I really enjoy.

It's something that I really enjoy.

Just when we started, we took somebody that we know and we consulted with him, you know, how to build the serverless part and the infrastructure as code part and, you know, how you manage that. I remember him saying, just separate the data part and the application part. And we didn't understand what he said. And eventually we said, hey, he was so right.

Just when we started, we took somebody that we know and we consulted with him, you know, how to build the serverless part and the infrastructure as code part and, you know, how you manage that. I remember him saying, just separate the data part and the application part. And we didn't understand what he said. And eventually we said, hey, he was so right.

We had to do that because everything is glued together. And the way the system works now, it poses a problem for us when you deploy that piece of infrastructure together with the data. We had a bad experience with that going forward. And again, we did a lot of stuff internally in the technical side that we said, hey, we don't know what to do. We just want to do something and let's do that.

We had to do that because everything is glued together. And the way the system works now, it poses a problem for us when you deploy that piece of infrastructure together with the data. We had a bad experience with that going forward. And again, we did a lot of stuff internally in the technical side that we said, hey, we don't know what to do. We just want to do something and let's do that.

And it turns out to be a mistake. But that's part of the game, I think. Another thing in terms of the company, I think sometimes when you think you need somebody to help you with this part or that part, if it's like a marketing person or salesperson or customer success, if you reach the point that you think you need this person to come along and you need to hire him,

And it turns out to be a mistake. But that's part of the game, I think. Another thing in terms of the company, I think sometimes when you think you need somebody to help you with this part or that part, if it's like a marketing person or salesperson or customer success, if you reach the point that you think you need this person to come along and you need to hire him,

I think it's too late already. And we ended up doing that a few times because it takes a while to hire him and it takes a while to onboard the person. And, you know, it takes time for him to be efficient at the job and it takes time for him to understand the culture and his colleagues and how things are done within the company. And I think sometimes we were saying, hey, we need this person.

I think it's too late already. And we ended up doing that a few times because it takes a while to hire him and it takes a while to onboard the person. And, you know, it takes time for him to be efficient at the job and it takes time for him to understand the culture and his colleagues and how things are done within the company. And I think sometimes we were saying, hey, we need this person.

And we actually needed it three, six months prior to that.

And we actually needed it three, six months prior to that.

in order to make the company more efficient so i think those are like the bigger mistakes that we've made again overall every company will have mistakes it's more about how you learn from that and how you improve on those mistakes okay this will be fun tell me what the future looks like for m0 for you know the company the product and for your team

in order to make the company more efficient so i think those are like the bigger mistakes that we've made again overall every company will have mistakes it's more about how you learn from that and how you improve on those mistakes okay this will be fun tell me what the future looks like for m0 for you know the company the product and for your team

As part of the product itself, so it's a young market. I think we do have competition here, but they're as young as us and the market is still young and there's tons of things that we can do here. And we get a lot of customer feedback on things that we need to do and have to do.

As part of the product itself, so it's a young market. I think we do have competition here, but they're as young as us and the market is still young and there's tons of things that we can do here. And we get a lot of customer feedback on things that we need to do and have to do.

And we have a lot of things and a lot of ideas on how to improve the overall deployment process that each company goes through. And how do you do that in a large scale? And how do you manage the entire cloud if it's in terms of what insights you can get from it? How do you control cost? How do you do that in large scale? How do you do self-service with infrastructure as code?

And we have a lot of things and a lot of ideas on how to improve the overall deployment process that each company goes through. And how do you do that in a large scale? And how do you manage the entire cloud if it's in terms of what insights you can get from it? How do you control cost? How do you do that in large scale? How do you do self-service with infrastructure as code?

So basically, we have a lot of things that we want to implement within the process of deploying and managing your cloud infrastructure as a whole. And I think overall, we are seeing a lot of growth in that area. And I think what we need to do is help developers.

So basically, we have a lot of things that we want to implement within the process of deploying and managing your cloud infrastructure as a whole. And I think overall, we are seeing a lot of growth in that area. And I think what we need to do is help developers.

those customers be on the right track of managing and doing everything they can in order to be better at infrastructure as code and get the most of the cloud within these frameworks And we have a lot of coverage to take in that sense. And again, we have a lot of customers and our customer base is growing rapidly.

those customers be on the right track of managing and doing everything they can in order to be better at infrastructure as code and get the most of the cloud within these frameworks And we have a lot of coverage to take in that sense. And again, we have a lot of customers and our customer base is growing rapidly.

So hopefully we'll make those feedbacks and those customers happy going forward and get more value for them in order to make them successful and obviously as a company successful. And that trickles down to everything.

So hopefully we'll make those feedbacks and those customers happy going forward and get more value for them in order to make them successful and obviously as a company successful. And that trickles down to everything.

I think when you see the customers, when they see the value, when they understand how they can perform better and how they can be efficient with a tool like MZero, it goes back to making the company successful, growing the company and scaling it over time.

I think when you see the customers, when they see the value, when they understand how they can perform better and how they can be efficient with a tool like MZero, it goes back to making the company successful, growing the company and scaling it over time.

It's the road along the way that influenced me. As an Israeli, you join the army and you have a lot of commanders and a lot of people along the way that you encounter. And then on a regular basis, the friends you have, the family that you have as well. Also, in your professional life, you have a lot of people that you meet and work with. And I think

It's the road along the way that influenced me. As an Israeli, you join the army and you have a lot of commanders and a lot of people along the way that you encounter. And then on a regular basis, the friends you have, the family that you have as well. Also, in your professional life, you have a lot of people that you meet and work with. And I think

I can't name one because I think I took from everybody along the way. And sometimes it's not like they influenced me on how to do stuff. A lot of them did. But I think a lot of the time is I see how they do stuff and say, OK, I'm taking this part, but I'm not taking this part because I don't believe in that.

I can't name one because I think I took from everybody along the way. And sometimes it's not like they influenced me on how to do stuff. A lot of them did. But I think a lot of the time is I see how they do stuff and say, OK, I'm taking this part, but I'm not taking this part because I don't believe in that.

And I think along the way, I saw a lot of people and I said, OK, this is something I have to do. This is something that makes total sense. And I want to do that thing. But then again, you have a lot of people when you say, OK, that's what I don't want to do. I don't want to be in that situation. Each one, you take little pieces of things.

And I think along the way, I saw a lot of people and I said, OK, this is something I have to do. This is something that makes total sense. And I want to do that thing. But then again, you have a lot of people when you say, OK, that's what I don't want to do. I don't want to be in that situation. Each one, you take little pieces of things.

I can say I remember seeing one of the CEO of the company that I used to work with. He was like really charismatic and really uplifting. And I said, yeah, I want to be like him in that term. I want to be uplifting. I want to be with a smile. I want to make people happy with their job and their workspace. So I think from every little one, I took a little bit.

I can say I remember seeing one of the CEO of the company that I used to work with. He was like really charismatic and really uplifting. And I said, yeah, I want to be like him in that term. I want to be uplifting. I want to be with a smile. I want to make people happy with their job and their workspace. So I think from every little one, I took a little bit.

But again, not only the good part, also the not as good part and saying, hey, I don't want to be like that.

But again, not only the good part, also the not as good part and saying, hey, I don't want to be like that.

You need to understand this is a long run. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint and you need to be prepared for that. Sometimes you need to put full throttle on the gas and make everything as fast as possible. But it's a long play. You need to understand that. And there's a lot of highs and a lot of lows.

You need to understand this is a long run. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint and you need to be prepared for that. Sometimes you need to put full throttle on the gas and make everything as fast as possible. But it's a long play. You need to understand that. And there's a lot of highs and a lot of lows.

And, you know, as a founder, you're in between the investors and in between the workers and the people around you and the management and the customers. And you're in the center of all of this. And again, it's a long run and there's a lot of highs. There's a lot of lows. And you need to make sure you're emotionally equipped and ready for that.

And, you know, as a founder, you're in between the investors and in between the workers and the people around you and the management and the customers. And you're in the center of all of this. And again, it's a long run and there's a lot of highs. There's a lot of lows. And you need to make sure you're emotionally equipped and ready for that.

And I think another thing is that you will get a lot of feedback from a lot of people. As an entrepreneur, and I recommend that, you need to talk to a lot of people around you. And you'll talk to customers and you'll talk to your co-workers and colleagues. And you'll get a lot of feedback. You'll get feedback that you need to sometimes filter.

And I think another thing is that you will get a lot of feedback from a lot of people. As an entrepreneur, and I recommend that, you need to talk to a lot of people around you. And you'll talk to customers and you'll talk to your co-workers and colleagues. And you'll get a lot of feedback. You'll get feedback that you need to sometimes filter.

You need to get the essence of the feedback from everybody. What's the right feedback that you need to go and implement? And sometimes feedback that you will get, it's not like the priority for you. And you need to filter that and trust your instincts. Because you know best most of the time, because you are in the trenches, you are with the customers, you are with the product.

You need to get the essence of the feedback from everybody. What's the right feedback that you need to go and implement? And sometimes feedback that you will get, it's not like the priority for you. And you need to filter that and trust your instincts. Because you know best most of the time, because you are in the trenches, you are with the customers, you are with the product.

You need to trust your instinct and make sure you get the feedback, but filter it out so it will be a positive feedback that you can do something about it. When you go and raise money, you'll hear a lot of no's. You'll hear a lot of feedback. You'll hear a lot of stuff that it's not exactly what they're looking for.

You need to trust your instinct and make sure you get the feedback, but filter it out so it will be a positive feedback that you can do something about it. When you go and raise money, you'll hear a lot of no's. You'll hear a lot of feedback. You'll hear a lot of stuff that it's not exactly what they're looking for.

And me and Ohad, whenever a session with an investor, we said, okay, what can we do better? What feedback that we got? And then how can we improve? And sometimes the feedback that we got wasn't exactly relevant to what we are going to build on what we thought. And we filter it out, what's right and what's wrong for us.

And me and Ohad, whenever a session with an investor, we said, okay, what can we do better? What feedback that we got? And then how can we improve? And sometimes the feedback that we got wasn't exactly relevant to what we are going to build on what we thought. And we filter it out, what's right and what's wrong for us.

And I think we knew better and we knew best what's the right feedback to get and what's not and how to implement that. And that's just an example. I think you'll get it, as I mentioned, from customer, for the product, from your colleagues, from your co-workers, from your investors, whoever you're talking to. But trust yourself and trust your instincts.

And I think we knew better and we knew best what's the right feedback to get and what's not and how to implement that. And that's just an example. I think you'll get it, as I mentioned, from customer, for the product, from your colleagues, from your co-workers, from your investors, whoever you're talking to. But trust yourself and trust your instincts.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for having me.

Angera is a platform to manage all of your cloud deployments on top of infrastructure as code. It doesn't matter which framework you use. We are a platform to manage all of the deployments on top of that. We bring a platform to enable you

Angera is a platform to manage all of your cloud deployments on top of infrastructure as code. It doesn't matter which framework you use. We are a platform to manage all of the deployments on top of that. We bring a platform to enable you

to know exactly what you deploy, how you deploy, do governance and policies around that, and make sure you're compliant with everything that you need to be compliant with.

to know exactly what you deploy, how you deploy, do governance and policies around that, and make sure you're compliant with everything that you need to be compliant with.

Also managing the cost and everything around that, automation, and basically giving you a full visibility on everything that you do in the cloud on top of those frameworks, like self-service insights and everything in between, basically. How we started the company is basically my co-founder and the CEO. We know each other way back. We used to work in a big tech company here in Israel.

Also managing the cost and everything around that, automation, and basically giving you a full visibility on everything that you do in the cloud on top of those frameworks, like self-service insights and everything in between, basically. How we started the company is basically my co-founder and the CEO. We know each other way back. We used to work in a big tech company here in Israel.

And we basically had a problem when we were both managers in the company that we have problems with scaling our dev environments and overall QA environments, production environments. One of the challenges that we have is how to do that efficiently so that we can consume code and execute code and do it in an efficient, fast way. The problem was that there was no cloud back then.

And we basically had a problem when we were both managers in the company that we have problems with scaling our dev environments and overall QA environments, production environments. One of the challenges that we have is how to do that efficiently so that we can consume code and execute code and do it in an efficient, fast way. The problem was that there was no cloud back then.

It was just getting started and we weren't on the cloud. Doha led this project in order to make this thing more efficient and we started involving me into this process and we started building something internally. And then along the way we encountered Infrastructure as Code. We both left that company and went on a different journey.

It was just getting started and we weren't on the cloud. Doha led this project in order to make this thing more efficient and we started involving me into this process and we started building something internally. And then along the way we encountered Infrastructure as Code. We both left that company and went on a different journey.

I encountered Infrastructure as Cloud for the first time at a place that basically the DevOps team needed to do everything manually in order to deploy those cloud infrastructure resources. And I had a lot of issues with that because I couldn't do anything but file a ticket in order to make things happen.

I encountered Infrastructure as Cloud for the first time at a place that basically the DevOps team needed to do everything manually in order to deploy those cloud infrastructure resources. And I had a lot of issues with that because I couldn't do anything but file a ticket in order to make things happen.

Then Ohad, he used to have a consulting DevOps company, and he saw that with a lot of these customers, they struggle to understand what's going on with the cloud, what's going on with their infrastructure as code. And basically, we got together and say, hey, there's a problem here. that everybody is talking about.

Then Ohad, he used to have a consulting DevOps company, and he saw that with a lot of these customers, they struggle to understand what's going on with the cloud, what's going on with their infrastructure as code. And basically, we got together and say, hey, there's a problem here. that everybody is talking about.

And we used to have this problem, the exact same problem, back in the day before infrastructure as code was a thing. And we said, okay, we need to build something around that. And we went on to talk with a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies, a lot of DevOps engineers, a lot of VP R&Ds. We started to think how we build a product on top of that to help exactly that.

And we used to have this problem, the exact same problem, back in the day before infrastructure as code was a thing. And we said, okay, we need to build something around that. And we went on to talk with a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies, a lot of DevOps engineers, a lot of VP R&Ds. We started to think how we build a product on top of that to help exactly that.

most of what we've talked we've built over the years and if you take a look at the current platform it's basically the same ideas that we had

most of what we've talked we've built over the years and if you take a look at the current platform it's basically the same ideas that we had

The MVP took us a few months to build. We went and talked to a few design partners and I think we stretched the minimal part of the MVP. We did like very basic stuff just in order to deploy something.

The MVP took us a few months to build. We went and talked to a few design partners and I think we stretched the minimal part of the MVP. We did like very basic stuff just in order to deploy something.

I remember going to install the first product in a customer and he uses the Bitbucket as his VCS and we went to install that and we didn't support SSH keys and it didn't work so we went back and after a week we came back to him and said hey now you can use SSH with our product and then he said okay now I need to manage users and we didn't have the ability to manage users and we went

I remember going to install the first product in a customer and he uses the Bitbucket as his VCS and we went to install that and we didn't support SSH keys and it didn't work so we went back and after a week we came back to him and said hey now you can use SSH with our product and then he said okay now I need to manage users and we didn't have the ability to manage users and we went

on and build that. So it was really a thin layer of what was needed and we basically took a lot of feedback from customers and early adopters in order to make this platform as efficient and as built-in for customers feedback. In terms of tools that we are using, we're mainly on AWS. Our infrastructure is mainly there.

on and build that. So it was really a thin layer of what was needed and we basically took a lot of feedback from customers and early adopters in order to make this platform as efficient and as built-in for customers feedback. In terms of tools that we are using, we're mainly on AWS. Our infrastructure is mainly there.

As we are a platform to manage infrastructure as code, everything that we've built is using infrastructure as code. And we are a cloud-savvy team, basically. We're using a lot of the infrastructure and services that AWS provides. We are mostly serverless. So everything, almost everything that we do, we're using serverless architecture within AWS.

As we are a platform to manage infrastructure as code, everything that we've built is using infrastructure as code. And we are a cloud-savvy team, basically. We're using a lot of the infrastructure and services that AWS provides. We are mostly serverless. So everything, almost everything that we do, we're using serverless architecture within AWS.

The front end is like a React single page application. And yeah, that's pretty much it.

The front end is like a React single page application. And yeah, that's pretty much it.

In terms of the technical stuff, we did a lot of compromising and trying to build stuff that just make them work for first glance and see how it evolves. We have a way to deploy stuff to the cloud and that requires compute. And we started off using a Lambda to deploy the customer infrastructure. The thing is that Lambda is, you have 15 minutes, you cannot do anything more than 15 minutes.

In terms of the technical stuff, we did a lot of compromising and trying to build stuff that just make them work for first glance and see how it evolves. We have a way to deploy stuff to the cloud and that requires compute. And we started off using a Lambda to deploy the customer infrastructure. The thing is that Lambda is, you have 15 minutes, you cannot do anything more than 15 minutes.

And we said, okay, let's start with Lambdas. And once we know somebody will need something else, we'll move to a different thing. And we said, okay. We hit that wall and somebody says, hey, I need a deployment that is longer than 15 minutes. And we moved to another serverless framework. It was like ECS, which is great. But then we needed to have something else.

And we said, okay, let's start with Lambdas. And once we know somebody will need something else, we'll move to a different thing. And we said, okay. We hit that wall and somebody says, hey, I need a deployment that is longer than 15 minutes. And we moved to another serverless framework. It was like ECS, which is great. But then we needed to have something else.

We needed to have somebody else running that piece of code. And we have something that we call self-hosted agent, where you have an agent that basically runs your code in your infrastructure. And then we needed to move to Kubernetes cluster because everybody's using Kubernetes and that's like a different way to do that.

We needed to have somebody else running that piece of code. And we have something that we call self-hosted agent, where you have an agent that basically runs your code in your infrastructure. And then we needed to move to Kubernetes cluster because everybody's using Kubernetes and that's like a different way to do that.

So along the way, we did a lot of trade-off and we said, okay, that's something that is right for now. But then again, going forward, we know and we knew that we needed to implement other stuff. And I think the same went through the product as well. We had as I mentioned, a very basic MVP.

So along the way, we did a lot of trade-off and we said, okay, that's something that is right for now. But then again, going forward, we know and we knew that we needed to implement other stuff. And I think the same went through the product as well. We had as I mentioned, a very basic MVP.

And we said, okay, let's hit another wall and get more feedback from the customer and then go ahead and build that. And we did it all the time and we still keep on doing that to move fast and to get stuff out and running and get feedback from customers in order to improve that accordingly.

And we said, okay, let's hit another wall and get more feedback from the customer and then go ahead and build that. And we did it all the time and we still keep on doing that to move fast and to get stuff out and running and get feedback from customers in order to improve that accordingly.

We basically had problems with scaling our dev environments and overall QA environments, production environments. One of the challenges that we have is how to do that efficiently so that we can consume code and execute code. The problem was that there was no cloud back then. It was just getting started, and we weren't on the cloud.

We basically had problems with scaling our dev environments and overall QA environments, production environments. One of the challenges that we have is how to do that efficiently so that we can consume code and execute code. The problem was that there was no cloud back then. It was just getting started, and we weren't on the cloud.

We had to say no to a lot of feature requests or feedback coming from customers because we knew it wasn't aligned with our vision. But you have to keep on getting that feedback all the time and what we've done is create like a framework on how to prioritize things that if one customer says, hey, I need that feature, maybe it's just him that needs it.

We had to say no to a lot of feature requests or feedback coming from customers because we knew it wasn't aligned with our vision. But you have to keep on getting that feedback all the time and what we've done is create like a framework on how to prioritize things that if one customer says, hey, I need that feature, maybe it's just him that needs it.

And we want to hear it from other customers before we go and implement that. And sometimes you do a certain feature for a certain customer and then all of a sudden you get a lot of other customers saying, hey, this is great. I needed that and I wanted that.

And we want to hear it from other customers before we go and implement that. And sometimes you do a certain feature for a certain customer and then all of a sudden you get a lot of other customers saying, hey, this is great. I needed that and I wanted that.

And I think one of the features that we had that opened the door for other customers was basically the self hosted agent, mostly around security. And a lot of customers wanted to run their deployments within their infrastructure.

And I think one of the features that we had that opened the door for other customers was basically the self hosted agent, mostly around security. And a lot of customers wanted to run their deployments within their infrastructure.

And once we had it and there was like a specific customer that we did it for him, all of a sudden we got tons of customers that wanted to implement that and use this feature. And now most of our bigger customers are using this feature. In terms of how you build and prioritize, I think the main thing to keep in mind is it's aligned with your vision and the product vision.

And once we had it and there was like a specific customer that we did it for him, all of a sudden we got tons of customers that wanted to implement that and use this feature. And now most of our bigger customers are using this feature. In terms of how you build and prioritize, I think the main thing to keep in mind is it's aligned with your vision and the product vision.

And it makes sense and you get like more than one feedback that you need to do it. I think that's something that we should consider doing. I have another example. We started with Terraform and then we heard a lot of other frameworks out there and the first one we heard was Terragrunt. Okay, now it's the time to do something about it and it's aligned with our vision.

And it makes sense and you get like more than one feedback that you need to do it. I think that's something that we should consider doing. I have another example. We started with Terraform and then we heard a lot of other frameworks out there and the first one we heard was Terragrunt. Okay, now it's the time to do something about it and it's aligned with our vision.

We want to do infrastructure as code platform and not Terraform platform management. So we went on and built that and I think I don't know, maybe 30, 40% of our customers right now are using Terragrunt within the platform. And then we went to deploy more stuff and using more frameworks like Pulumi and CloudFormation and Helm. And I think that was like the first time that we heard it.

We said, okay, there's a lot of traction here. We need to go and build it. And it's aligned with our vision to be multi-framework. So that's how we prioritize that over other stuff.

Zohad led this project in order to make this thing more efficient, and we started involving me into this process, and we started building something internally. My name is Zomri Chai. I'm co-founder and CDO at Mzero.

Team and people is the most important piece of a company. And what we ended up doing, like firstly in the R&D, we didn't have teams, we didn't have, and we still don't have like teams and we don't have a single ownership. We don't have a front end team and a back end team.

and everybody's doing everything and we looked for very versatile people at first because you need people you know to do not their specific job but a lot of stuff around that because you're a small startup you don't have like tens or ten thousand people around you So you need people to not only do their specific job, but also do stuff that you don't have people to do that.

You need like engineers doing stuff that you usually don't get a lot of engineers doing. For example, if it's like blog posts and bargaining stuff, and maybe support. So we look for people that are versatile, that can help us grow and be in the position in order to grow themselves within the company as we scale.

So I think there's two terms of scale when you talk about the company. One is the application and the tech, and the other one is the team itself. And I think for the application part, as we're using mostly serverless and mostly AWS, most of the things that we did were scalable by nature. As I mentioned, we used Lambdas, and Lambda can furtherly scale as much as you want.

But then again, you have to tweak that a little bit. So Lambdas, for example, had a cold start and there's a lot of stuff around it in order to manage that in large scale that you needed to do. And there are a lot of features that weren't around when we started that helped you with that.

But overall, our thinking was how that scales both in terms of the application, both in terms of the infrastructure and the database. But sometimes you take some product or technical debt that you say, hey, nobody will reach a thousand or two thousand of something, but it ends up surprising you.

And then you need to scale also how the UX or the front end is acting because you didn't anticipate that. So those are the places that we sometimes struggled. So that's, in terms of the application part, we relied mostly around what AWS has to offer and how you build on top of that. You are basically saying they will take care of a scale.

We just need to tweak a few things here and there in order to make it work. In terms of the team, we've talked about how you grow that over time. And I think we did it over time. We said, okay, this will work up until 10 people, 20 people, but as you scaled, it won't work. But for now it's working as well as we need it to be.

And then once we hit that wall or saw a lot of issues or problems, we fixed that along the way with the team building.

One is the team that we've talked about. As I mentioned, I think the most important thing in a company is the people around it. There's no such thing as a company without the people around it. As you said, I say we a lot because it's not only me. It's not like me and Ohad built that company. The people around us and the team built that. And that's something I took a lot of pride in.

And the other thing is more around the product.

For me seeing somebody that is using the platform and making the most out of it and getting value out of the product that I took part of building something that I take proud in because it's like you build something from scratch and now you have so many users, so many customers, so many people enjoying that and the feedback that you get sometimes it's bad but most of the time it's good.

It's something that I really enjoy.

Just when we started, we took somebody that we know and we consulted with him, you know, how to build the serverless part and the infrastructure as code part and, you know, how you manage that. I remember him saying, just separate the data part and the application part. And we didn't understand what he said. And eventually we said, hey, he was so right.

We had to do that because everything is glued together. And the way the system works now, it poses a problem for us when you deploy that piece of infrastructure together with the data. We had a bad experience with that going forward. And again, we did a lot of stuff internally in the technical side that we said, hey, we don't know what to do. We just want to do something and let's do that.

And it turns out to be a mistake. But that's part of the game, I think. Another thing in terms of the company, I think sometimes when you think you need somebody to help you with this part or that part, if it's like a marketing person or salesperson or customer success, if you reach the point that you think you need this person to come along and you need to hire him,

I think it's too late already. And we ended up doing that a few times because it takes a while to hire him and it takes a while to onboard the person. And, you know, it takes time for him to be efficient at the job and it takes time for him to understand the culture and his colleagues and how things are done within the company. And I think sometimes we were saying, hey, we need this person.

And we actually needed it three, six months prior to that.

in order to make the company more efficient so i think those are like the bigger mistakes that we've made again overall every company will have mistakes it's more about how you learn from that and how you improve on those mistakes okay this will be fun tell me what the future looks like for m0 for you know the company the product and for your team

As part of the product itself, so it's a young market. I think we do have competition here, but they're as young as us and the market is still young and there's tons of things that we can do here. And we get a lot of customer feedback on things that we need to do and have to do.

And we have a lot of things and a lot of ideas on how to improve the overall deployment process that each company goes through. And how do you do that in a large scale? And how do you manage the entire cloud if it's in terms of what insights you can get from it? How do you control cost? How do you do that in large scale? How do you do self-service with infrastructure as code?

So basically, we have a lot of things that we want to implement within the process of deploying and managing your cloud infrastructure as a whole. And I think overall, we are seeing a lot of growth in that area. And I think what we need to do is help developers.

those customers be on the right track of managing and doing everything they can in order to be better at infrastructure as code and get the most of the cloud within these frameworks And we have a lot of coverage to take in that sense. And again, we have a lot of customers and our customer base is growing rapidly.

So hopefully we'll make those feedbacks and those customers happy going forward and get more value for them in order to make them successful and obviously as a company successful. And that trickles down to everything.

I think when you see the customers, when they see the value, when they understand how they can perform better and how they can be efficient with a tool like MZero, it goes back to making the company successful, growing the company and scaling it over time.

It's the road along the way that influenced me. As an Israeli, you join the army and you have a lot of commanders and a lot of people along the way that you encounter. And then on a regular basis, the friends you have, the family that you have as well. Also, in your professional life, you have a lot of people that you meet and work with. And I think

I can't name one because I think I took from everybody along the way. And sometimes it's not like they influenced me on how to do stuff. A lot of them did. But I think a lot of the time is I see how they do stuff and say, OK, I'm taking this part, but I'm not taking this part because I don't believe in that.

And I think along the way, I saw a lot of people and I said, OK, this is something I have to do. This is something that makes total sense. And I want to do that thing. But then again, you have a lot of people when you say, OK, that's what I don't want to do. I don't want to be in that situation. Each one, you take little pieces of things.

I can say I remember seeing one of the CEO of the company that I used to work with. He was like really charismatic and really uplifting. And I said, yeah, I want to be like him in that term. I want to be uplifting. I want to be with a smile. I want to make people happy with their job and their workspace. So I think from every little one, I took a little bit.

But again, not only the good part, also the not as good part and saying, hey, I don't want to be like that.

You need to understand this is a long run. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint and you need to be prepared for that. Sometimes you need to put full throttle on the gas and make everything as fast as possible. But it's a long play. You need to understand that. And there's a lot of highs and a lot of lows.

And, you know, as a founder, you're in between the investors and in between the workers and the people around you and the management and the customers. And you're in the center of all of this. And again, it's a long run and there's a lot of highs. There's a lot of lows. And you need to make sure you're emotionally equipped and ready for that.

And I think another thing is that you will get a lot of feedback from a lot of people. As an entrepreneur, and I recommend that, you need to talk to a lot of people around you. And you'll talk to customers and you'll talk to your co-workers and colleagues. And you'll get a lot of feedback. You'll get feedback that you need to sometimes filter.

You need to get the essence of the feedback from everybody. What's the right feedback that you need to go and implement? And sometimes feedback that you will get, it's not like the priority for you. And you need to filter that and trust your instincts. Because you know best most of the time, because you are in the trenches, you are with the customers, you are with the product.

You need to trust your instinct and make sure you get the feedback, but filter it out so it will be a positive feedback that you can do something about it. When you go and raise money, you'll hear a lot of no's. You'll hear a lot of feedback. You'll hear a lot of stuff that it's not exactly what they're looking for.

And me and Ohad, whenever a session with an investor, we said, okay, what can we do better? What feedback that we got? And then how can we improve? And sometimes the feedback that we got wasn't exactly relevant to what we are going to build on what we thought. And we filter it out, what's right and what's wrong for us.

And I think we knew better and we knew best what's the right feedback to get and what's not and how to implement that. And that's just an example. I think you'll get it, as I mentioned, from customer, for the product, from your colleagues, from your co-workers, from your investors, whoever you're talking to. But trust yourself and trust your instincts.

Thank you for having me.

Angera is a platform to manage all of your cloud deployments on top of infrastructure as code. It doesn't matter which framework you use. We are a platform to manage all of the deployments on top of that. We bring a platform to enable you

to know exactly what you deploy, how you deploy, do governance and policies around that, and make sure you're compliant with everything that you need to be compliant with.

Also managing the cost and everything around that, automation, and basically giving you a full visibility on everything that you do in the cloud on top of those frameworks, like self-service insights and everything in between, basically. How we started the company is basically my co-founder and the CEO. We know each other way back. We used to work in a big tech company here in Israel.

And we basically had a problem when we were both managers in the company that we have problems with scaling our dev environments and overall QA environments, production environments. One of the challenges that we have is how to do that efficiently so that we can consume code and execute code and do it in an efficient, fast way. The problem was that there was no cloud back then.

It was just getting started and we weren't on the cloud. Doha led this project in order to make this thing more efficient and we started involving me into this process and we started building something internally. And then along the way we encountered Infrastructure as Code. We both left that company and went on a different journey.

I encountered Infrastructure as Cloud for the first time at a place that basically the DevOps team needed to do everything manually in order to deploy those cloud infrastructure resources. And I had a lot of issues with that because I couldn't do anything but file a ticket in order to make things happen.

Then Ohad, he used to have a consulting DevOps company, and he saw that with a lot of these customers, they struggle to understand what's going on with the cloud, what's going on with their infrastructure as code. And basically, we got together and say, hey, there's a problem here. that everybody is talking about.

And we used to have this problem, the exact same problem, back in the day before infrastructure as code was a thing. And we said, okay, we need to build something around that. And we went on to talk with a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies, a lot of DevOps engineers, a lot of VP R&Ds. We started to think how we build a product on top of that to help exactly that.

most of what we've talked we've built over the years and if you take a look at the current platform it's basically the same ideas that we had

The MVP took us a few months to build. We went and talked to a few design partners and I think we stretched the minimal part of the MVP. We did like very basic stuff just in order to deploy something.

I remember going to install the first product in a customer and he uses the Bitbucket as his VCS and we went to install that and we didn't support SSH keys and it didn't work so we went back and after a week we came back to him and said hey now you can use SSH with our product and then he said okay now I need to manage users and we didn't have the ability to manage users and we went

on and build that. So it was really a thin layer of what was needed and we basically took a lot of feedback from customers and early adopters in order to make this platform as efficient and as built-in for customers feedback. In terms of tools that we are using, we're mainly on AWS. Our infrastructure is mainly there.

As we are a platform to manage infrastructure as code, everything that we've built is using infrastructure as code. And we are a cloud-savvy team, basically. We're using a lot of the infrastructure and services that AWS provides. We are mostly serverless. So everything, almost everything that we do, we're using serverless architecture within AWS.

The front end is like a React single page application. And yeah, that's pretty much it.

In terms of the technical stuff, we did a lot of compromising and trying to build stuff that just make them work for first glance and see how it evolves. We have a way to deploy stuff to the cloud and that requires compute. And we started off using a Lambda to deploy the customer infrastructure. The thing is that Lambda is, you have 15 minutes, you cannot do anything more than 15 minutes.

And we said, okay, let's start with Lambdas. And once we know somebody will need something else, we'll move to a different thing. And we said, okay. We hit that wall and somebody says, hey, I need a deployment that is longer than 15 minutes. And we moved to another serverless framework. It was like ECS, which is great. But then we needed to have something else.

We needed to have somebody else running that piece of code. And we have something that we call self-hosted agent, where you have an agent that basically runs your code in your infrastructure. And then we needed to move to Kubernetes cluster because everybody's using Kubernetes and that's like a different way to do that.

So along the way, we did a lot of trade-off and we said, okay, that's something that is right for now. But then again, going forward, we know and we knew that we needed to implement other stuff. And I think the same went through the product as well. We had as I mentioned, a very basic MVP.

And we said, okay, let's hit another wall and get more feedback from the customer and then go ahead and build that. And we did it all the time and we still keep on doing that to move fast and to get stuff out and running and get feedback from customers in order to improve that accordingly.

We basically had problems with scaling our dev environments and overall QA environments, production environments. One of the challenges that we have is how to do that efficiently so that we can consume code and execute code. The problem was that there was no cloud back then. It was just getting started, and we weren't on the cloud.

We had to say no to a lot of feature requests or feedback coming from customers because we knew it wasn't aligned with our vision. But you have to keep on getting that feedback all the time and what we've done is create like a framework on how to prioritize things that if one customer says, hey, I need that feature, maybe it's just him that needs it.

And we want to hear it from other customers before we go and implement that. And sometimes you do a certain feature for a certain customer and then all of a sudden you get a lot of other customers saying, hey, this is great. I needed that and I wanted that.

And I think one of the features that we had that opened the door for other customers was basically the self hosted agent, mostly around security. And a lot of customers wanted to run their deployments within their infrastructure.

And once we had it and there was like a specific customer that we did it for him, all of a sudden we got tons of customers that wanted to implement that and use this feature. And now most of our bigger customers are using this feature. In terms of how you build and prioritize, I think the main thing to keep in mind is it's aligned with your vision and the product vision.

And it makes sense and you get like more than one feedback that you need to do it. I think that's something that we should consider doing. I have another example. We started with Terraform and then we heard a lot of other frameworks out there and the first one we heard was Terragrunt. Okay, now it's the time to do something about it and it's aligned with our vision.