Episode #77: Meet the Startup Helping Dev Teams Build Better with AI

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Samantha Herrick:
  Welcome back to The Land of Tomorrow. This is a podcast brought to you by the folks at Alumni Ventures, The Tech Optimist, where we talk to future innovators that are shaping our future.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Hey. I think my first articles of incorporation I filed in middle school. My first patent I filed in high school.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Very cool.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  This is just what I love to do, and it’s what I’ve always loved to do.

  Samantha Herrick:
  That is Erik Severinghaus, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Bloomfilter.

  Chris Sklarin:
  You’re really addressing at Bloomfilter this growing complexity in software developments.

  Samantha Herrick:
  That is Chris Sklarin, Managing Partner here at Alumni Ventures. If you were to ask me very candidly on the table, “What is software development,” I don’t really know I could give you an accurate answer. I’m going to give you an accurate answer so that when we listen to the rest of this interview, everyone knows what’s going on. That’s me. My name is Samantha Herrick, the guide for this podcast.

  Okay, a little bit more into the startup that we have today, Bloomfilter. Bloomfilter is an innovative startup focused on improving the software development life cycle through process intelligence and process mining. Founded in 2022 and based in Akron, Ohio, the company aims to make software development more transparent, predictable, and efficient.

  Bloomfilter’s mission is to create a more measurable and efficient software development process. They apply process mining techniques, traditionally used in industries like manufacturing, to the software development field. This approach allows teams to analyze digital footprints left in development tools to understand and optimize how software is built.

  The company offers an AI-driven process mining platform that integrates with common development tools, provides real-time visibility into software development, and identifies process weaknesses, workflow deviations, likely cycle times, and areas of rework. Bloomfilter was co-founded by Andrew Wolfe, Erik Severinghaus, and Chris Stoll. The company has raised a total of $7.12 million in funding, with its most recent round bringing $1.5 million to the table about a year ago.

  Recently, Bloomfilter announced a significant partnership with Celonis, a leader in process mining and process intelligence. This collaboration has led to the creation of Celonis for the Software Development Life Cycle. Bloomfilter’s goal is to address the persistent challenges in software development, where a high percentage of projects ship late, over budget, or not at all. By developing tools for better visibility and analysis, they aim to help CTOs and CIOs make more informed decisions, optimize resource allocation, and improve overall development efficiency.

  The company’s approach to an open SDLC reflects its commitment to bringing clarity to complex software development environments and helping teams focus on what drives success.

  Now, a little bit more into the Celonis announcement. They recently attended Celosphere 2024, a software development convention, where Bloomfilter produced a video showcasing their partnership with Celonis, their presence at the convention, the people they met, and how they exemplify their technology. We’re going to start off the show with that video from Bloomfilter at this convention, and then we’ll hop into a disclaimer ad and right into the interview. Sit tight and enjoy.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Good morning, Celosphere. My name is Erik Severinghaus. I’m the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Bloomfilter. I am here to announce for the first time, Celonis for the Software Development Life Cycle, powered by Bloomfilter. We’re here at Celosphere 2024. There are thousands of people here focused on how to make the process better.

  We believe in opening the black box of the software development life cycle by using the power of Celonis’ process mining tools to make the software development life cycle more observable, predictable, efficient, and nimble. We do that by pulling all the information out of the tools that you’re already using, so we can find inefficiencies in the process. We can help you understand what we’re building, when we’re going to get it, and how much it costs.

  Sam Aborne:
  For us at Bloomfilter, we think it’s a natural partnership to take what we know about the software development life cycle and blend it with what Celonis knows about process intelligence.

  Andrew Lieberman:
  I’m a big fan of going from zero to one, and I think working with you guys has really been a speed run from zero to one. With Celonis, we’re proud to be source-system agnostic and process-agnostic, but that doesn’t make us experts. Partnering with Bloomfilter brings SDLC knowledge, which we can combine with the Celonis platform and techniques we know to add real depth to the use case.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Celosphere 2024, thank you so much for your warm reception, thank you for being here, and thank you for this opportunity. We are so excited. Thank you, Celosphere 2024. Thank you.

  Recorded Ad:
  Exceptional value creation comes from solving hard things. Alumni Ventures Deep Tech Fund is a portfolio of 20 to 30 ventures run by exceptional teams tackling huge opportunities in AI, space, energy, transportation, cybersecurity, and more. These game-changing ventures have strong lead venture investors and practical approaches to creating shareholder value. If you’re interested in investing in the future of Deep Tech, visit av.vc/deeptech to learn more.

  Samantha Herrick:
  As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

  Chris Sklarin:
  But you yourself—you had a remarkable journey with successful exits going back to iContact and Vocus back in the day. What inspired you to dive into the world of startups, and what keeps you motivated?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. I’m the weird kid who started reading The Wall Street Journal probably in fourth grade, and I started programming in second grade. I’m an okay athlete, but I was never athletic enough to play right field for the Chicago Cubs. If I wasn’t going to be a major league baseball player, the thing I always really wanted to be was a startup entrepreneur.

  I think my first articles of incorporation I filed in middle school. My first patent I filed in high school.

  This is just what I love to do, and it’s what I’ve always loved to do. I’ve tried to do everything else. I’ve tried to be a ski bum. I’ve tried to be a mountaineer. I’ve tried to be an author. I’ve tried a million different things that I enjoy as hobbies, and I’ve thought maybe that could be a profession. What I keep coming back to is this job. I think it’s the most fun, interesting, fulfilling job there is in the world, so I get excited that I’ve got the opportunity to do it every day.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Very cool. So what lessons from previous ventures like SpringCM or SimpleRelevance? What’s been most helpful to your role now at Bloomfilter?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. There are a few things that I say all the time. The first tactical one: capital is oxygen, so raise capital when it’s available. I’ve tried to solve big problems before and run out of money—not because I didn’t have the right idea and not even because our execution was terrible, but because we just didn’t have the capital to make it through the ups and downs. You guys have been a fantastic partner around that. We certainly appreciate that. So, job one is to be appropriately capitalized for the problem you’re trying to solve.

  Another thing is recognizing that this journey only gets harder. I think some people go into entrepreneurship thinking, “Man, once I raise my seed round, everything will be easy.” I’ve operated at every point in the curve, from zero to publicly traded, and I’ve seen the whole movie. Once you’ve seen it all, you recognize that even though this part of the journey is hard, it’s still only Act 1, and it’s only going to get crazier. It’s only going to get worse. It’s only going to get more wild. The stakes are only going to get higher. The stresses are only going to get bigger and all of that stuff.

  So, for me, it’s recognizing that these are the good old days that I’m living in right now. These are the days I’m going to look back on and go, “Ah, remember when you could just do that?” So have fun with it. Enjoy it. Be proud of the fact that I’ve earned the right to the problems that we get to solve right now, and don’t let them overwhelm me. That’s the big stuff.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Got it. Got it. So from scaling businesses to building teams, you’ve seen a wide variety of challenges. What do you think are the key traits of a successful entrepreneur in today’s tech landscape?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Patrick Lencioni describes the ideal team player as somebody who is humble, hungry, and smart. I don’t know that I’ve found a better framework for people that I want to bet on, that I want to work with, that I want to generally surround myself with than those three things. So those are qualities that I try to cultivate in myself. They’re qualities that I look for in others—whether I’m investing in them, hiring them, or partnering with them. Whatever it might be, I’m always looking for that rare combination of humble, hungry, and smart because when you find that, special things tend to happen.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Got it. Got it. Perfect. So, on to Bloomfilter in particular—the origin story of Bloomfilter. What led to the idea of using process mining to optimize software development? Between you and TechStars, how did that work out? How did the company come to be?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. Bloomfilter actually started before I got involved with it—Andrew Wolfe and three friends. Andrew is my Co-founder and Co-CEO. He was running a consulting company called Skiplist. He likes to name his companies after data science terms, so he was running a company called Skiplist.

  He had this vision as a product guy of, “I want to create a better way for people to build software.” I got to know Andrew in TechStars Chicago, where I was an entrepreneur in residence. What I realized is having started programming since before I knew how to walk practically—I taught myself to program in second grade. I’ve been building software my entire life. I’ve been operating software companies—primarily venture-backed, private equity-owned, or publicly traded—for the better part of 20 years.

  Man, I have never been at a place where it feels like the executive team really understands what all the neckbeards in the backroom are building in this software stack. That manifests itself in all kinds of terrible outcomes. Seventy-eight percent of software is late, over budget, or doesn’t ship. Ask your CIO in the next board meeting, “Hey, how easy is it for you to get answers to the three core questions: What are we building? When are we going to get it? And how much does it cost?”

  What you see everywhere—never mind second-order questions like how do we do more with less, how do we reduce the risk of defects, all this other stuff—is that nobody even has observability. They don’t have an understanding of what’s happening in the process, much less a deep understanding and a deep level of communication around how we can improve it.

  I really think this is one of—if you think about the executives at the C-level of the companies that you invest in, Chris, and you think about the board meetings—the Chief Revenue Officer probably has Salesforce and Clari and a bunch of other tools that allow them to understand what’s happening in their business. The Chief Financial Officer almost certainly has an ERP system and their payables and receivables. They may have something like Celonis that processes mining to get visibility into it.

  Then you think about the CIO and the CTO in the boardroom. You ask these questions—what are we building, when are we going to get it—and it’s almost certainly presented on a series of Excel sheets that require a tremendous amount of manual work as well as human judgment. Those spreadsheets get copied and pasted into PowerPoint presentations that are out of date by the time they’re being presented. Nobody has operational decision-making and process intelligence around what’s happening within what is the largest source of OpEx growth in most organizations. OpEx and even CapEx in many cases. Software spend is incredibly expensive. It’s growing everywhere, and nobody has a clue what’s happening inside this big black box.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Yeah.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  So it leads to arguments. It leads to organizational dysfunction. It leads to late deliverables. It leads to misalignment of scope and requirements. It’s not because anybody’s doing anything wrong. It’s not because the CFO is a bean counter that doesn’t care about technology, and it’s not because the CIO doesn’t care about finances. It’s because it is so hard to understand what’s happening and how to translate that between different parts of the business.

  Anyway, that’s a really long answer to the question you asked me. But what I saw in Bloomfilter when I met Andrew and when I started first thinking about investing myself—and then ultimately when Andrew invited me to come in and help him run and build this business—what I saw was, “Oh my God. We have the opportunity to solve what is the biggest unsolved problem in most organizations,” which is the dysfunction happening inside the software development life cycle and between technical executives and business executives around how those things get translated.

  That’s the problem we set off to solve. It’s what we’ve been investing in for the last couple of years. It’s what our customers are starting to see that we can make meaningful headway towards. So, it is an incredibly exciting journey for us.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Yeah, that’s great. It leads right to my next question, which is you’re really addressing at Bloomfilter this growing complexity in software development. So share a bit more now about how you actually help businesses streamline operations. What is it that you’re doing that before this they were trying to do with spreadsheets, right, and chewing gum basically?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. Yeah.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Okay. Before we get into a bit more about Bloomfilter’s story and their technology and their innovation and why they do what they do, I want to take us a few stepping stones back and answer the question of what software development is and how it works.

  Now, again, I’m not a software developer. I’m not a machine technologist, I guess you could say. So if you were to ask me very candidly on the table, “What is software development,” I don’t really know that I could give you an accurate answer. So I’m going to give you an accurate answer so that when we listen to the rest of this interview, everyone knows what’s going on, right?

  There might be a few listeners out there that are a bit confused by this process. I would be one of those, so I’m going to try and break that boundary and get us all on the same page so that we can really appreciate and understand the innovations that Erik and Bloomfilter are making.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Software development is a structured process of creating, designing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. It involves a series of stages that transform an initial idea or requirement into a fully functional software product. Here’s a bit of an overview of how this works: it’s a systematic approach to conceiving, designing, programming, testing, and maintaining software systems. Its primary goals are to create efficient and reliable software solutions, meet specific user or business needs, and deliver high-quality products within time and budget constraints.

  So, the process. The software development process, often referred to as the software development life cycle or SDLC, which you’ll see and hear a lot today, typically consists of several key stages:

  • Requirement Gathering and Analysis: Understanding and documenting the project’s goals, collecting detailed requirements from stakeholders, and analyzing feasibility from technical, financial, and operational standpoints.

  • Planning: Defining the project’s scope and objectives, estimating resources, costs, and timelines, and creating a project roadmap.

  • Design: Developing a system architecture, creating detailed software design specifications, and planning the user interface and user experience (UI/UX).

  • Development and Implementation: Writing code based on design specifications, implementing features, and testing their functionality while following coding standards and best practices.

  • Testing: Conducting various types of testing (unit, integration, system, or user acceptance), identifying and fixing bugs or issues, and ensuring the software meets quality standards and requirements.

  • Deployment: Preparing the software for release, installing and configuring it in the production environment, and providing necessary documentation and user training.

  • Support and Maintenance: Addressing post-release issues and bugs, implementing updates, and ensuring long-term reliability.

  There are several different methodologies teams can use:

  • Waterfall: A linear, sequential approach where each phase must be completed before moving to the next.

  • Agile: An iterative approach emphasizing flexibility, collaboration, and rapid delivery.

  • Scrum: An Agile framework focusing on short development cycles called sprints.

  • DevOps: Combines development and operations to improve collaboration and streamline delivery.

  Key Components: Successful software development relies on team collaboration, version control, development tools, testing frameworks, and project management. The process is never static—it involves continuous improvement through regular review, process optimization, incorporating feedback, and adopting new technologies.

  In conclusion: Software development is a complex, multifaceted process that combines technical expertise, creativity, and project management skills to create functional and valuable software solutions. By following a structured approach and employing best practices, development teams can efficiently transform ideas into robust, user-friendly applications that meet the needs of businesses and users alike.

  Bloomfilter is focused on improving this entire life cycle. As you can tell, many of the steps in this process are complicated and difficult. Bloomfilter’s approach uses intelligence and process mining to help streamline and simplify this life cycle for the people developing software.

  All right, we’re going to take a second for an ad. I hope you found that interesting. We’re going to get through the AV ad, and then we’ll finish the interview with Erik and Chris. The end of this interview is super lively—there’s a lot of discussion with valid points that I’m excited for you to hear. So sit back, relax, and we’ll be right back.

  Recorded Ad:
  Do you have a venture capital portfolio of cutting-edge startups? Without one, you could be missing out on enormous value creation and a more diversified personal portfolio. Alumni Ventures, ranked a top 20 VC firm by CB Insights, is the leading VC firm for individual investors. Believe in investing in innovation? Visit av.vc/foundation to get started.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  So, if you look at most people’s software development life cycle, there are anywhere from 11 to 15 tools. If you think about how a bill becomes a law—how does an idea become shipped production code—it sits in roadmap systems, requirement systems like Aha!, Productboard, and Miro. Then it moved into project management systems like Figma for designs, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Trello, and Asana. It goes into development systems like GitHub and GitLab, then gets deployed using CI/CD systems like CircleCI and Jenkins. There are DevSecOps tools, communication platforms like Slack and Teams—the list goes on and on. We could spend another hour just talking about DevTools.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Right, just about DevTools.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Exactly. So, how are you supposed to understand what’s happening in an end-to-end process that spans all these systems? It’s nearly impossible. People spend unbelievable amounts of time and energy creating Excel spreadsheets to manually extract, transform, and analyze data from these different sources.

  What we do is connect to these various systems and extract the data about how the process is flowing. We can show how work is moving, where it’s progressing, where it’s stuck, where cycle times are long. We use an academic technique called process mining to stitch this information together and truly understand what’s happening in the complex process.

  This allows us to identify how the process is working, where it’s going right, where it’s going wrong, where there’s rework, waste, or delays, and whether a project will ship on time. We present this in a series of business intelligence dashboards built into our platform.

  Now, we also have advanced AI capabilities that not only stitch this information together but also allow users to interrogate it with an AI copilot. So, questions you’d typically ask a project manager or product manager about project status or problem areas can now be answered accurately and quickly by AI.

  And the biggest news—we’ve just announced a partnership with Celonis, the world leader in process mining. We’ve released Celonis for the Software Development Life Cycle, powered by Bloomfilter. This means we can analyze these processes within our bespoke SaaS platform and also leverage Celonis’ advanced capabilities, expanding the ecosystem we can offer.

  Chris Sklarin:
  So, that ties really nicely to the Celonis section I wanted to get to. I know you made a huge announcement this week. That’s awesome. There’s this process mining leader that you’re now partnering with. How did the partnership come about, and what strategic value does it bring to both of you? I mean, obviously you’re the little guy here, but they clearly saw something that was worthwhile partnering with Bloomfilter.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. It’s really a cool story. I’ve known Celonis for a while. I’ve worked with them in a previous life. When I got involved with Bloomfilter, we really put up on the vision board, “Hey, what’s our goal?” What Celonis has done for the CFO, we want to do for the software development world, for the CIO or the CTO. We have always had them as the goal and the vision of the value that we aspire to bring and to build.

  So, we got reintroduced by an analyst at Forrester actually, who said, “Hey, you guys should talk to each other. What you’re doing is really cool, and there’s some potential for overlap.” Based on that introduction, we reconnected. We saw, hey, there really is something here. There’s a really exciting partnership. A lot of the stuff that we do could be accretive to their platform and help fill in some gaps around this particular use case, and a lot of the ways that they’re thinking about the world dovetail to the ways that we’re thinking about the world.

  Celonis also is aspiring to have more and more ISVs like us develop on their platform, so we get to blaze a trail here that ideally additional entrepreneurs will follow in this path. So, we looked at this together and Celonis said, “Hey, we would like to build a software development life cycle specific process mining application, and we’d like to do it in conjunction with Bloomfilter and using Bloomfilter’s intellectual property to power much of the native intelligence to it.” We thought that sounded fantastic.

  So, it has been a really, really exciting journey that to date has culminated in the big announcement that we made this week, Celonis for the Software Development Life Cycle, Powered by Bloomfilter. Then I get to head to Munich next week to sit down with Celonis customers and prospects at their Celosphere, their big industry conference, to talk to them.

  Most of the people at Celosphere already understand the power of process mining. It is an interesting thing, right? There’s basically two types of customers I talk to now. I talk to customers that understand the software development life cycle really, really well and are interested in learning why process mining might be helpful in making that life cycle more observable, predictable, efficient, and nimble. Then I also am now getting to talk to people that already understand why process mining is so incredibly important, but they’re trying to figure out how they apply those concepts to the specific use case in the domain of software development. So, I get to go over to Munich next week and have a lot of those conversations, which I’m really excited about.

  Chris Sklarin:
  That’s awesome. So how does this create, I guess, better ways for you and Celonis to stay competitive? I mean, it’s obviously a competitive world out there, and there are other folks trying to do this. What does this bring both of you?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah, so there’s a couple of really exciting things that come out of this for us. So for Bloomfilter, first of all, about half of the Fortune 2000 is already using Celonis. As we know, many of those companies have large and growing expenses in software development that we know they would like to better understand and to get a handle around that particular area of operational expense. So for us, we get a natural opportunity to earn some of those conversations that would’ve been much harder for us to get into.

  Then the other thing that we get is an enterprise-grade platform that allows us to iterate much faster on a series of building blocks that have already been battle-hardened. Right? So when you think about it, right now, Bloomfilter, we’ve been spending a fair bit of time reinventing the wheel of process mining in the very specific domain of software development. We no longer have to do a lot of that. Our product development becomes accelerated manyfold because we get to build on top of a set of capabilities that already exist and are already in use across the Global 2000. So, it dramatically accelerates how fast we can get to creating value for our customers. That’s awesome from our side.

  From Celonis’ side, what they see in all of this is they have built this set of tools and capabilities around process mining, and Celonis is the undisputed and universally recognized leader of doing this for the Chief Financial Officer. Celonis would like to have these capabilities be opened up to other entrepreneurs like us who say, “We can take this idea of process mining, and we can apply it to a whole bunch of domains and use cases.” So there are dozens to hundreds of other domains and use cases where process mining can be transformative, and it’s way beyond the scope of any one company to try and do all that themselves internally. So, while Celonis concentrates on what they do best, we can unlock the power of the platform to go take it in a completely different direction, in a way that accelerates the amount of value for our customers for both of us.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Right, right. I heard there was some network effect that Alumni Ventures was able to bring to you. What was that? If you want to describe what we were able to do for you from our platform CEO Services group?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. I mean, I’ll just give the quick plug for Alumni Ventures, man. Every investor says they add a lot of value. You guys having a bespoke and focused CEO team that helps me get everything from desks and meeting rooms in far-flung locations to better visibility for my application to custom introductions where we need it, is just an unbelievable differentiator for Alumni Ventures.

  Samantha Herrick:
  All right, quick plug from Erik here for all of the insanely great work that the partners, associates, and investors here at Alumni Ventures do and just how much they can help startup companies just like Erik’s. So, a little bit of information on what that AV process looks like. Alumni Ventures’ platform team, which they call CEO Services, introduced Erik to the VP of Engineering for AI at Celonis, which we’re going to hear about in a second, who is a member of the AV Expert Network. This is just one example of all of the incredible ways that AV offers value to their portfolio companies outside of just writing checks and having that equity standing that the guys joke about here in a second. I’m mostly going to let Erik take away how important the connection to Celonis was. He gave us a really good intro just a few minutes ago, and he’s going to get into it a little bit more.

  Bloomfilter and Celonis have partnered to offer a software development life cycle management tool for enterprises. The platform uses AI insights to help organizations improve efficiency and reduce cost and risk in their software development cycles. It identifies and addresses common issues like bottlenecks and delays that often lead to project overruns, particularly valuable for large companies relying on streamlined software development to support rapid innovation. So, just like how Erik was saying, that Celonis wants to open up their doors to other entrepreneurs and how their technology can be applied to other circumstances rather than financials where Bloomfilter is about technology. It’s making their technology more nimble, as Erik would say, and more valuable for more people and not just defined to the financial sector.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  So the size, scale, breadth, and depth of your network is unparalleled. I think Alumni Ventures is the most active early-stage investor in the world, and you guys have just a massive LP base. Right? So, when I’m looking at something like, “Hey, we think we’ve got a transformative partnership with Celonis. Just thought we’d let you know,” and your CEO services desk responds back with, “Well, would you like to meet the guy that’s running their AI strategy?” Oh, my God. It accelerates what we can do dramatically.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Awesome.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  So, that introduction. Actually, as we go to Celosphere next week, because of that introduction, Chris, and that connection that you guys were kind enough to make for us, we now have a really cool demonstration of our AI stitched together with Celonis’ that we put together very, very quickly. We would not have made that magic happen were it not for the introduction and the connection that you guys were able to make.

  Chris Sklarin:
  That’s awesome. Well, that’s great. Of course, we want you to succeed because we have an equity interest, obviously.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Absolutely. I understand that it’s self-serving, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t very, very much appreciate it.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Absolutely. All for the better. It’s all good. So rolling backwards a little bit on the arrangement of Bloomfilter and growing it, how has your Co-CEO arrangement been with Andrew? I know he was there, brought you in. TechStars, you loved it enough to say, “Hey, I want to buy into this business and now I want to help run this business.” How’s that working, and what are the advantages or challenges to the setup?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. I think being Co-CEO, as an investor, I’ve seen it go both ways. It’s either the best modality you could ask for or the worst. For us, it’s been that former category. For us, it has been. For me, I can say because Andrew is not here, but I would imagine he would say similar things. For me, it gives me a true partner in building and running the business in a way that I’ve never had before. A guy carrying a heavy load and a heavy backpack. A guy that I just have zero question about his commitment, his focus. He is just right there in the boat shoulder to shoulder, and man, we get to partner on everything, and I love it.

  The shout out that I’ll give to Andrew personally is he is the most emotionally intelligent, technically brilliant person that I’ve ever encountered. I’ve met a lot of really smart technical people. I’ve met a lot of emotionally intelligent people. I have very rarely found those two things at the level that he has them in the same person, so I think that’s the difference between a relationship like this working incredibly well and one that ends up in a really challenging state. Honestly, it’s not.

  We have adjusted roles. We’ve taken over different parts of the business. We’ve shifted around domain competencies. We’ve had a series of hard conversations with one another to make sure that we get on the same page. That only happens, and it’s only constructive if the people on both sides of that conversation are able to put their ego aside and say, “Look man. This ain’t about me. This is about how we build something that’s amazing and transformative.” Andrew is just aces at that, and it makes it a privilege to have the opportunity to operate with him.

  Chris Sklarin:
  That’s great. Well, it’s great to find that combination of skills in one person, right, in partnering?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  It sure is. It doesn’t always go that way, and I’m very lucky to have found it.

  Chris Sklarin:
  So to wrap up, I guess, what’s your primary ask or need for Bloomfilter at the moment, and how can Alumni Ventures and our community help with that?

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Yeah. We are always obviously looking for customers who want to change the way they build software, want their software process to be more observable, more predictable, more efficient, more nimble. So, there’s an omnipresent ask of if any of this sounds interesting to you, check us out.

  Chris Sklarin:
  What’s that ideal customer profile? I mean, it can’t be like two guys writing software. It’s got to be more than a few people, but maybe it’s not 5,000. I don’t know.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  It’s got to be more than two. We actually have customers that love us. We have customer references as small as 10.

  Chris Sklarin:
  There you go.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  We have customers that are at 10,000. So, I don’t know if that’s the textbook right answer for how to have an ideal customer profile, but we’re seeing success at all ends of the spectrum so far because the problem is so prevalent and so consistent.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Yeah.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Others ask? I mean, we’re certainly not at the end of our capital journey, so if there are investors listening to this that are interested, we enjoy having conversations. We’ve been very blessed to have an unbelievable cap table, and in challenging times for early-stage companies, we have been well capitalized. It’s something that we certainly appreciate and expect to continue. Then great employees, man. I mean, we’re open for business. We’re growing, we’re scaling, so if this problem set sounds interesting, particularly if you’re in the Chicago or Cleveland metro areas, we’re looking for great people to come join us.

  Chris Sklarin:
  Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you for spending this half hour with us. Great to catch up, and good luck in Germany next week. That’ll be an awesome trip.

  Erik Severinghaus:
  Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it.

  Chris Sklarin:
  All right.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Thanks again for tuning into the Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using, and remember to subscribe to keep up with each episode. The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions. So please email us at [email protected] with any of those, and be sure to visit our website at av.vc. As always, keep building.