#98 - Meet the Startup Offering Developers a Toolkit To Resolve Their Most Pressing Problems

Welcome to The Tech Optimist, where we explore the ideas that are pushing the world forward. I'm Samantha Herrick, your host and producer of this show, here to guide you through the latest innovations, the minds behind them, and what they mean for the future. I don't just ask the questions, I connect the pieces, challenge perspectives, and drop in tech notes here and there to give you the full story. So, if you're ready to look ahead, let's get started. Engineering teams are under more pressure than ever, expected to build faster, scale smarter, and do it all with fewer roadblocks. But here's the reality. Productivity isn't just about writing more code, it's about how teams work together. And too often, the biggest inefficiencies go unnoticed. That is where our guest company today, Quotient, comes in. Founded by Lizzie Matusov, Quotient is rethinking developer productivity, not with another dashboard of metrics, but with real insights and actions that help engineering teams work better, not just harder. Powered by the SPACE framework, Quotient pulls data from both systems and people to identify friction in engineering workflows, whether it's slow onboarding, process bottlenecks, or unseen collaboration gaps. And unlike traditional tools, it doesn't just highlight problems, it helps fix them. And this isn't just an internal tool. Quotient is shaping the conversation around engineering leadership. Their team even co-authors Research-Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter dedicated to helping tech leaders apply research-backed strategies to their own teams. So how does this all work, and how is Quotient setting a new standard for developer efficiency? Let's turn to Lizzie for that answer.

Quotient is a dev tool that discovers, prioritizes, and resolves the friction that slows down engineering teams. So each week, engineers spend up to 30% of their time on avoidable friction— things like slow builds, waiting for a code review, Finding requirements for their work. Quotient learns how that engineering team works and uses it to find and fix the areas where engineering teams can be more efficient.

Let's talk a little bit more about Lizzie, our guest today. Before launching Quotient, Lizzie walked the walk, working as a technical product manager and software engineer at Invitae and Red Hat. But her experience doesn't just stop at code. She's also a venture fellow, a Harvard MBA graduate, and an official member of the Forbes Technology Council. Beyond Quotient, Lizzie is shaping the industry dialogue. She co-authors the newsletter that I talked about, Research-Driven Engineering Leadership, which brings real data and research into engineering team strategy. She's also been a speaker at major conferences like Grace Hopper Celebration and Women of Silicon Valley, which helps teams and leaders navigate the fast-evolving world of software development. But here's what makes Lizzie stand out and why we are so excited she's here with us today. She's not just an engineer or a founder, she's an architect of better ways to work.

So imagine getting that 30% of your development team time back to focus on what matters for your customer. That's the Quotient promise.

Yeah, I love this, Wave. I mean, I feel like this is— developing teams or development teams have been sort of hungering for something like this for many, many years. So it's this great solution to see.

I hope by now that everyone recognizes that voice. This is no stranger to The Tech Optimist. Joining us today is Mira Oakes. A partner focused on early-stage investments in vertical SaaS, AI/ML, and infrastructure. She's been a driving force behind pre-seed and seed investments, leveraging a background in finance, strategy, and operations to support high-potential startups. With an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and experience managing billion-dollar budgets at Yale, Mira brings a sharp analytical lens to every investment. She's worked with early-stage venture funds, launched business ventures, and has secured major corporate partnerships, all of which fuel fuel her expertise in identifying and scaling transformative technology. And today, she's sitting down with Lizzie to uncover how their startup is reshaping the industry.

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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. Every startup has a moment of realization, a point where a problem becomes too big to ignore. For Lizzie and her team, that moment came during her time at Red Hat and Invitae, where she saw engineering teams losing 30% of their time in inefficiencies. Instead of accepting it as the norm, she built the solution. Quotient was born out of real-world challenges, and with the help of her co-founder Joe, Lizzie set out to transform developer productivity. Now, let's dive into the origin story of Quotient.

The origin story is a fun one. So, Quotient really came about through my own life experiences. So, when I was working at Red Hat, I had a very unique job where I was a software engineer, but I was a part of our consulting arm, which basically meant that we would spin up a new team to deliver customer value over a 6 to 9 month time horizon, and then we would figure out how to work effectively together. And then 9 months later, we would disband, form a new team, and focus on a new project. So, I learned a lot about how efficient teams can come together and really figure out what's blocking them and move faster. And then when I switched over to working what I would call in-house or at Invitae, I had a very different experience. We went through the more traditional hypergrowth, and I saw how adding new team members did not necessarily help us move faster in all cases. And so, that contrasting experience is what got me curious about understanding what slows engineering teams down, and how can we figure out where those areas are so that the team can move faster together. So, that's really where the seed was planted. I went to graduate school and pursued a joint degree, an MBA and a Master's of Engineering Sciences at Harvard. And I spent the whole 2-year time period thinking about this problem, testing out different solutions. And it was really when I was graduating in spring of 2022 that the sort of idea for Quotient really came to be. And that's also where I met my co-founder, Joe. That is a great story. So, one of my professors, actually, Julia Austin, who is both, you know, someone who's very involved in the entrepreneurial space and a professor at Harvard and a former CTO and VP of engineering. She actually knew the work that I was doing and had worked previously with my co-founder at his first company. Cool. So, he had previously— yeah, he had previously started and then grown and eventually sold his company, Proletariat, to Activision Games. It was a gaming startup, and she was coaching him through the later years as a startup coach. And so she reached out and said, hey, I, you know, I know that you're working on this and maybe, you know, you guys should just talk. Uh, I think she believed it was just an email intro and we'll see what happens. And 3 months later, I reached out to her and said, hey, great news. We're going to work together on Quotient. So that was 2 and a half years ago. Uh, and it's been an incredible ride ever since.

Oh my gosh. So many nuggets that I love about that. I mean, one, I think it's always amazing that, like, you saw both the enterprise, like, level of sort of developer productivity at Red Hat, but also you saw what it meant to, like, sort of be in hyperscale mode with Invitae. Oh, yeah. I think that's, like, such a unique perspective on developer teams generally. Um, and then I love that, uh, your professor sort of had real sort of working experience with their co-founder. I think that, like, that, that testimonial is so important in that founder matchmaking. I don't know if that sort of, I don't know, sort of gave you more confidence in that sort of partnership moving forward, but I've found that a lot of our founders really appreciate sort of just having real testimonial about what is it like to really work with this person.

Yeah, I mean, starting a company with somebody is not an easy feat. It just requires really being comfortable with disagreement, with owning a shared view of the future, and then really working together to create the path to get there. And so now looking back, I think of that story and just, I can see all of the places where things could have been crazy. And, you know, I'm so glad that we had, as you said, that testimonial. And it's really also just shown me over time just how important having a healthy co-founder relationship is. So I always try my best to, you know, earlier stage founders to sort of remind them to set a good foundation and also to continue to invest in the co-founder relationship because there's going to be peaks and valleys, there's going to be highs and lows, and you want to make sure that your relationship is ready to withstand that.

No, absolutely. I guess moving more towards sort of Quotient and sort of today's state, you, as I mentioned, you sort of saw developer productivity at all sort of echelons of sort of company building. And I guess I'm curious sort of why you felt that was the sort of place to really focus your energy? I mean, there's so many problems that face developers today. I'm just curious sort of why that ended up being sort of that main pain point for you. And then even if you look at the broader landscape, sort of how did you sort of take in, you know, there are some solutions already that are out there that are solving aspects of this, and I'm just curious how you felt about the positioning of Quotient in the market.

Yeah, so there's really 2 ways to look at that. One is the lived experience, and, you know, I think One of the advantages I think founders have when they've lived an experience is they know if there's been an unmet pain point. So for example, I worked at a company that had tried to use one of these solutions to solve these areas of avoidable friction. And I was on an engineering team where, you know, there were times that we would be stuck for a quarter of a day not being able to do any work because we're waiting on a build or I need a review from someone who's across the world, and without that review, I really can't move forward. And so, having lived that, you really start to understand that there's an area that needs to be solved for. So, that's like the emotional appeal. And then looking at it from a more analytical market approach, it's very true that we exist in what's called a red ocean market, or one in which there's tons of different competitors. But when you look at the landscape and really pay close attention to it, What you see is that the market is really heavily focused on data and dashboards, and that's the primary value in that space. Quotient has a very different take on that. The market, in our perspective and from what we've seen, has really changed. Engineering organizations are flattening, teams need to do more with less, and the pressure to focus and deliver is much higher than in a zero interest rate environment. So, our hypothesis is that customers actually don't need more data to analyze. What they need is to know what the problem is and how to fix it. And that's exactly what Quotient's solution is focused on. So, we don't promise to give you 50,000 dashboards that you, the engineering leader, have to sift through. We promise to give you the streamlined understanding of where that area of friction is and what the solution is to resolve it.

Got it. No, that's really helpful. And especially given sort of how, I mean, to your point, the sort of ROI on like solving a, I mean, because of course businesses are always thinking about how this affects their customers, right? Sort of being able to give them the tools to sort of plug those sort of holes effectively and immediately is honestly what's driving a lot of growth these days is like really just reinforcing that stickiness with customers. Exactly. I really appreciate that.

Before we hop into the next topic of this interview with Lizzie and Mira, we're going to take a short break, so don't go anywhere.

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Raising a seed round is a defining moment for any startup. It's when a vision gains momentum and turns into something actually scalable. And for Quotient, that moment had just arrived with $3 million in fresh funding, including investment from us at Alumni Ventures. Quotient is shifting gears years. Lizzie and her team bootstrapped with just 2 full-time employees, proving their concept before bringing on a team. Now they're expanding, hiring top talent, and scaling their impact. So what's next, and what else are we missing? Let's hear how this funding is shaping Quotient's future.

Uh, you sort of recently secured, um, Quotient's seed round, which I think is incredibly exciting, and that's part of how we joined your journey. Can you share any of the specifics on that round and sort of how this capital will allow you to sort of, you know, think about that next chapter of growth with Quotient?

It is such an exciting time for us, and we're so excited to partner with the Alumni Ventures team too. So yes, we did just recently close our seed round. We raised $3 million from Resolute Ventures as our lead investor and a number of really fantastic funds, including Alumni Ventures. Joining our journey as well. And it's really fun for us because we're actually a little bit unique. We made all of our progress moving from our pre-seed to our seed with myself and my co-founder as our only full-time employees. Because we're both engineers, we could sort of flex between building and selling much more easily. And I definitely see that as a huge advantage to how we built Quotient. Now that we've Formed our initial hypothesis and really proven out that there's a market need and that we're actually capturing some of that demand. We're really moving towards like the next chapter of Quotient. And what that looks like is, you know, proving out more than just our initial hypothesis, expanding our rate of learning and impact, and actually bringing on a small and mighty team to support that. So, we've already begun that journey and I think seeing Quotient enter this next chapter and kind of move from this, this, you know, smaller thing to this bigger thing has been really rewarding for both of us.

Well, you totally set me up for my next and probably final question, which is really around, you know, what is the best way for our audience to sort of engage with you and the Quotient team? You know, are there people you're hoping to connect with? You know, what are you sort of focused on sort of for 2025 and how can we be helpful?

Thank you for asking. I think right now we're focused on 2 really big areas. One is growing the team. That's really top of mind for us. So right now we're especially looking for software engineers who are excited about having tremendous impact and want to be early in a massive growing opportunity. So that's one really big thing. And then the other is getting deeper into the minds of our customers. Engineering has changed a lot in the last 2 years, especially in this new AI-driven world. And that's actually great news for us because it means that processes are being disrupted, and we as Quotient know exactly where those best team optimizations are. So, to that end, we're constantly working with engineering leaders to understand their pain points, to see how they evolve as they change their practices within engineering organizations. And we're always excited to talk to engineering leaders and folks who really know that space well to get into their minds and see what they're thinking right now.

Got it. No, that's so helpful. Um, well, wonderful. Thank you so much for being here with us today, Lizzie. It was such a pleasure to have you, and, you know, we really appreciate the time.

Thank you. This was so fun.

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