Guest: David Cumberworth, Justin Johnson
Company: Macrometa
Show: Let’s Talk

Macrometa is a company that’s building a platform for developers to build extremely fast applications easily. It serves customers of all sizes to solve some of the most complicated problems for them. The company leverages Linode’s cloud for both internal and external usage. In this interview, two senior executives from Macrometa – Justin Johnson, Director of Developer Product and David Cumberworth, SVP of Sales – joined me to talk more about the company and how they use Linode.

Here is the edited transcript of the interview.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to Let’s Talk. Today we have two guests from Macrometa – Justin Johnson, Director of Developer Product and David Cumberworth, SVP of Sales. David, Justin, it’s great to have you on the show.

Justin Johnson: Hi.

David Cumberworth: Great to be here, Swapnil. Thanks for having us.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Since it’s the first time I’m talking to you folks, tell me a bit about the company itself. What problem are you folks trying to solve for the developer community?

Justin Johnson: Macrometa is building a platform for developers to build extremely fast applications easily. The way that we do that is we provide cloud services that are distributed globally. So we have a geo-distributed platform where a developer can store data as a database in multi-model and do real-time stuff with that data as well. It’s all serverless so a developer can get going just by signing up. It doesn’t have to do anything else other than get an API key and get started.

David Cumberworth: We’re trying to solve some very interesting challenges, Swapnil. As Justin alluded to, we are a geo-distributed database and that helps with a number of use cases, which we’ll certainly dive into, but putting data next to the source of the consumption of that data, be it an IoT device, be it a user, be it an in-house data consumer, creates a very broad set of use cases that frankly weren’t available to developers previously because of computer science’s challenges. So if you have data stored in a central cloud and the device, or an IoT appliance along the wire way, backhauling that data across a network is slow. So what Macrometa is doing is putting data and state next to those users. So that’s really opening a very broad set of use cases for developers by having data right next to them and right next to their appliances. So in next-generation, data-intensive applications, it has become a very straightforward thing to develop on top of Macrometa.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s talk a bit about your relationship with Linode. In what capacity are you folks working with them?

Justin Johnson: We use Linode for our self-service platform. So if you go to macrometa.com/ and sign up for our self-serve platform, we have a free tier. The server that Macrometa is running on is Linode and we have nine locations on that platform. So we’ve deployed to nine of those locations. We also use them for internal servers, for dev environments, testing and things like this.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Why did you choose Linode? What value did Linode bring not only to you but also to self-serving customers?

Justin Johnson: Linode’s great in price to performance. The amount of computing, the amount of resources they give you for what they charge is fantastic. And their service is rock solid. They’ve also been great with their support; friendly people get back to you right away. It’s just been a great relationship with them.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You also participated in their startup program, which is called Linode Startup Program. What is this program all about and how did it help you build your infrastructure, which you use both internally and externally?

David Cumberworth: We obviously started, as every other early-stage organization, operating in a very financially constrained way. And as Justin said, we wanted to stand up a free developer version of our PaaS so that developers get hands on the platform and start to play with the technology. Trying to build that in one of the three cloud titans just would have been cost prohibitive for us, even with their credits. So as Justin said, the support we get from Linode is fantastic. Our ability to use credits, and not just burn our own seed investments but also really allow customers and prospects to developers to access our product that sits on top of Linode, was really the driver to it to use or join the Linode Startup Program.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And since we’re talking about investment in funding, you folks raised a $20 million Series A funding in June. What are the areas that you are looking at investing in and growing with this round of funding?

David Cumberworth: We’ve got a very binary and straightforward answer to that, actually. So it’s a third-third-third pizza slice between third into sales, third into marketing and third into engineering. All areas obviously to build the business, but it’s very cleanly divided between those three areas of the business.

Swapnil Bhartiya:  Linode has data centers around the globe. Which ones do you leverage and how do you ensure that you help your customers adhere to local laws?

David Cumberworth: For us, PII and GDPR compliance are checkboxes. So it’s very easy for us to tag data to a region. And with hyper locality, we can tag data to a specific pop. So we sit on top of every Linode pop. Where we need very specific PII or GDPR compliance, we will tag data to a region and that data will never leave that region. So actually PII and GDPR compliance are checkbox items for us. It’s very straightforward to deliver with the GDN, on top of Linode.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Justin, David, thank you so much for taking time out today to talk about the company. And also thanks for explaining how you folks work with Linode and I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

David Cumberworth: Thank you so much.