Dominic Holt of Harpoon: Deploying Software the Easier Way

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos? Tacos in tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech Podcast, we interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview, and on Fridays, we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well, too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I'm thrilled to have founder and CEO of Harpoon, Dom Holt. Hey, Dom, thanks for being on the podcast.

Hey, thanks, Dale. It's really great to be here.

Yeah, it's been fun getting to know you and collaborate over the years of doing our CTO dinners together. I think that's where we first got to know each other. No, we may have gotten to know each other way back from the Hired.com days, huh?

Yeah, way back.

Yeah. Maybe five or five, six years ago or so. You've started a company since then. So. Harpoon. You want to give us a quick overview of what Harpoon is?

Yeah, I mean, I was. As you know, I was doing a bunch of consulting, and I kept running into a lot of similar problems across different clients, whether they were Fortune 500 companies or the Department of Defense or pretty much anybody with the whole software deployment space. So you know, building out all these custom DevOps scripts and CI CD pipelines and basically stuff that deploys your software, software for software. There's just a real gap in the marketplace for hiring talent in that space, being able to quickly build production environments and deploy your software. And so working with all these clients, I came up with the concept of Harpoon. We took some of the leading technology in the space as far as setting up a production environment using a tool like Kubernetes and we effectively built out a no code Kubernetes tool so that anybody can deploy a production grade instance of their software in the cloud or on prem using Kubernetes and then just use drag and drop to deploy software. So it is extremely simple to use and very easy to scale your software using hardware.

Oh, super cool. We're going to dive in a little bit more. Some use cases of where you're seeing it used, both from like team size industries. But let's take it back to how you got here because it wasn't just one day you woke up and said this is a need. It was obviously over time of seeing it and doing it many times over. How'd you get your start in kind of the software engineering world?

Yeah, me personally, I've always loved technology. My dad brought a Commodore 64 home one day when I was a kid and I was like, what the heck is this thing? You know, And I just was tinkering around with it and when I was 12, the Internet was like text and images, you know, it was very impressive. But my brother, he's a smart guy and he figured out how to start building websites and I was like, like wow, you know, like that's so amazing. How did you do that? And you know, can you teach me? And he was like, no, you're stupid, you're never going to be able to make a website. And so 12 year old Dom, I'm like now I'm gonna definitely build a website. So like two weeks later I had my own website. And you know, I was like trying to figure it out. I think, you know, I tried to build a business really early on out of website design and development. And it got to a point where I don't know, Maybe I was 16 or 17, I started looking at websites and I was like, wow, that's a really good website. Who did that? And I found one that was a six year old did it and I was like, well this isn't going to be the profession for me because six year olds are better than I am. So that's when I got into software development real quick.

Your first website, did it have the little trailing icons after the mouse? Because that was like, that was like the thing, right?

It wasn't particularly good, I mean I wouldn't impress anybody. But my first job was actually doing digital signal processing thing for the intelligence community.

And during college or that was after college.

Yeah, I was still in college at the time. I did a lot of work in college, a lot of co ops and internships and stuff. And then I ended up working for Lockheed Martin after that and I worked there for about 10 years.

Oh wow.

Mostly internal research and development. And so it's looking back on it was really good practice for being an entrepreneur because like my job was to learn new technologies, apply them to problems and build prototypes and MVPs and then go talk to customers and try to test them out. So I just continually was going through this process, this iteration loop of learning all these new technologies and like building stuff and like taking it to customers and sort of being like, hey, do you like this? Is this interesting? Do you care? You know, and then be like, oh yeah, maybe if you built this feature. So it was like a good first experience. I got tapped for some strategic stuff at the company or whatever and they told me I was high potential, whatever that means. And then they basically threw me in a room with a bunch of business people and said, so we got all these business problems and we want you to just figure them out. And it was like code word for we want you to do a bunch of free work that nobody else wants to do. And so I got to learn how Lockheed and By extension Fortune 500 companies are run and work. At a pretty early age I realized how incredibly inefficient they are. And I, stupid young Dom was I'm going to fix this, you know, like I can fix this. And so I started trying to call all these vice presidents and telling them just, you know, like just don't do this, don't do that. Just like they'd be more efficient if we did it this way. And they mostly hung up on me or had semi negative things to say to me. And ultimately I decided it was going to be easier to influence the company rather than instruct the leadership of a Fortune 500 company on what to do. So I created a new skunk works division of Lockheed without permission and proceeded to turn it into a new division of the company. And we ended up growing it to About a billion dollars in revenue annually. Really pissed off all of the aforementioned vice presidents. Convinced Legal to make a registered trademark for our new division of the company and eventually convinced some of those VPs to give me a job running the division that I made up. So that was cool because we got to work on a. And collaborate on a couple of projects with the original Skunk Works and those guys are. They have some good stories. We'll say. So I was basically chased out of Lockheed Martin and I went to work for a small business here in San Diego, which is where you and I met. And did that bring you to San.

Diego or were you already here?

I was already here. I had convinced Lockheed that San Diego was a great place for me to work and they had moved me here for a few years before that.

But so there was already a Lockheed presence in Syndicate, which makes sense I guess Defense and aerospace wise.

Yeah, there's not now at the time.

Okay.

Working with the Navy is tricky. So yeah, I ended up working for a company that was headquartered here. They're a smaller defense contractor who was more focused on doing work with the Navy. And I was there for about five years and I helped kind of grow the company from about 6 or 7 million in revenue to 50 or 60 million in revenue over five years. So we scaled up the company company together.

It's great. So all. And it was all defense related that between those 15 years or so between Lockheed and Salute.

Yeah, but I'm like really bad at working for other people. Like I have all this ownership mentality and like I keep wanting to do my own stuff. So throughout all of that time creating side gigs and startups and building software, I ended up creating a couple of different video games like Xbox games with some people and we got offers to, to distribute the games and I end up building like a social media app for a while. And like all of these startups were horrible failures. But you know, it taught me a lot about being an entrepreneur and a lot of things that you should probably avoid doing and a lot of good lessons.

Give us one of those. What'd you. What, what are the one like either if you were to start something new now, or someone's telling you I'm going to start something, maybe a former colleague who is also kind of from the software world. What would you tell them to do in terms of how and when to start?

Yeah, well, I mean there's a lot of lessons you can learn as far as an entrepreneur. It's like kind of, you know, like just somebody hits you With a bat repeatedly.

But like continuously fail forward is kind of the next.

But some of the personal lessons I learned, like going through startups is, and I should caveat with this was saying like everybody I started companies with are exemplary people and I love them as people and they were like very qualified folks. So it wasn't necessarily whether they were smart or qualified or awesome people because that was always the case. But you kind of get in these situations and then you know, just things don't click the right way. So like the video game company, it was like amazing group of talent but ultimately like all of them wanted to go into the video game industry and work for major producers. Some of them did. And nobody wanted to release a game right before they were going to go do that. That wasn't perfect. Right? Because in the video game industry if you release a bad game, you're basically dead to the industry for life. So we had a game that people were offering us money for. It won awards. We had distributors saying like, we'll distribute your game for us. And like the response from the team was no, it's not ready yet. Right. So that was my lesson and good enough ship product type things where I was desperately trying to sell the game because I didn't, you know, I want to retire before the end of college and it just didn't work out. We didn't make a dime. But you know, people were trying to hand us cash when we were demoing the game, like take my money. And we were like, no, I can't, I'm sorry. So that was unfortunate. I'd probably be, I mean I probably wouldn't be retired. But what I like to think, that's what I like to think. So I don't know the social media company again, you know, like I just learned a lot of rule lessons about co founders ultimately. Great group of guys. We kind of divided up the work to do. I was writing a lot of the software but at the end of the day everybody else had their own priorities and things going on and I just find found in the company. I was doing a lot of the work. You know, people aren't showing up to meetings and so it was just sort of disenfranchising to own 25% of a company where you just talk to yourself all the time. So those are definitely lessons that can be helpful to somebody. So when I started Harpoon, I actually chose not to have a co founder on purpose. It's not to say that I'm against co founders. I think it's really great to have a partner to go through the nightmare hellscape that you may have to go through in entrepreneurship.

Not may you will every day.

But I just made a conscious decision that whenever the co founder showed up, that was going to be the right one because they were, you know, had the right motivations and the right so skill set to match what I needed. Then, like, we would figure it out then. So I just kind of marched on by myself and that kind of kept me motivated to keep going because I was like, I don't have to check up on anybody else. I just have to look in the mirror every day and be like, are you pushing the company forward? No. Well, let's do your own.

Yep, got it. So. So what was the first time you realized Harpoon wasn't just like an idea or a feature kind of thing that you'd like to build? And it was like, this is a business. What was the first time you realized that and then and started working towards it being a standalone business?

Yeah, well, you know what, I had been delivering these, like, DevOps, custom DevOps scripts to some customers for a little while, and, you know, I just kind of decided that somebody was going to commoditize DevOps because it was too hard to find the talent. They were too expensive. Once you found them, even if you could hire them, you couldn't keep them because somebody else was going to offer them 20% more six months later. And so there just wasn't enough of them to go around. So I was like, somebody is definitely going to commoditize DevOps. And so what would that look like? And so, you know, I was just kind of like thinking about it during the day and being awake at night and like, thinking about it. And my wife and I had just had our first baby at the time. And so, like, our routine was to watch TV after we put the baby down or whatever in the next room over quietly. And so that was around the time Black Mirror came out. So there's like this one episode of Black Mirror is like this super futuristic whatever, and they had this interface of like all these systems booting up. And I swear to you, like, I jumped out of my seat and I said like, that's it really loudly. And my wife just looked at me like I was a psychopath. Like, I don't know who you are and why you're screaming. There's a baby that's sleeping. And I started like explaining all this DevOps stuff to my wife and like, how is all going to work? And she like, just looked at me like I was an alien. But then I just sat down the same night at my laptop and I started writing code because I got. I've got it, you know, and so it was like three months later, I had a working prototype. Definitely not an enterprise product, but, you know, just like, can this be done? And there was definitely a victory dance or something.

I bet that's pretty quick from, like, seeing it, thinking it, putting pen to paper on mvp, all you writing the code in that regard. It's when you. So did you start testing it, start talking about it with people? Like, who'd you. Who were kind of your first trials to see, like, is this the answer? Because obviously you thought it was.

Yeah, I mean, there's some good lessons. There's some good lessons there too, Neil. I mean, I knew the problem because I had been living it and I knew the customers, right, Because I had been building it for them. And I understood the technology because I had been implementing it and managing teams that were implementing it, but nobody else did, right? And so I was like, do you understand what this is? And, like, how it's going to change everything? And so I wanted to share it with everybody because I was like, how cool is this, right? So happy and proud I had this working prototype or whatever. So I proceed. Instead of actually continuing to make progress, to build out an enterprise product, I went on like a dog and pony show where I called all my friends who are VCs and all these other companies and some VCs I didn't know. And it wasn't even like I necessarily wanted money. I just wanted to show people and be like, look at this, you know, like, it's kind of like if you're a kid and you do arts and crafts and you're like, you're super proud of your drawing or whatever, and you go take it to your mom and dad and they're like, oh, yeah, that's great. That's great, Jimmy. But what is it? You know? Yeah, so. So, yeah, I took it and showed it all these people, and they're like, I have no idea what this is or why I should care, or, you know, like, I don't know what the market is. And I listened. I sat in a bunch of quote unquote technical experts in VC meetings telling me that it was a crap product and no one was ever going to buy it and there was going to be this other thing. And I mean, it's tough in the early days of entrepreneurship when you just got like that first iteration of your product and you're trying to sell it to a large population and you really got to find your people and market to them and there's going to be a lot of people that are not your people and they're going to say some mean things to you and you just got to get over it and keep moving forward.

Yep, yeah, that's for sure. Definitely got to get used to no's. Did you have this expectation that someone with a certain title or role or even business size was your customer and you found it's different over the time of who's using it or take us through? Who directly are you solving problems for in that regard?

Yeah, I mean, I think our biggest problem today, like we've iterated on the product, we've turned it from an alpha prototype capability into an enterprise grade product that you can actually scale up and deploy software with. But I think our biggest challenge right now, even though we have some paying customers, we are a bit early for the market we're in. It's definitely a challenge. There's a lot of people who are still trying to figure out how to, how to automate software deployment and like what is kubernetes and what are containers and how do you do microservices? And so there's a very fast growing but small market. I think right now that's kind of in the space where they could be considering a tool like this. And I mean we're going to see a massive acceleration as more companies go through this digital transformation process. They start moving towards container based deployments and they're going to the cloud and they're doing all this other stuff. Definitely the challenge for us has been talking to people and convincing them that this is the way to go. And maybe they just spent a bunch of money doing it all the manual way. Right? Or maybe they're trying to figure out what is the right way to go and they're looking at like, yeah, but I could just do what everybody else is doing and build all these custom scripts and do that and you know, like sometimes it's an emotional response versus a logical one. So the parable I like to use is like some of the CTOs I've talked with and I mean it's totally fine. It's an opinion, right? But you know, they're saying like, well, I couldn't possibly give up the level of control to deploy my software to a platform. I want to have all of the underlying scripts and software and like, if something goes wrong, I want to yell at an engineer late at night and Tell them to get up and fix the problem or whatnot. And so it's just not for me. And what I typically say to those people is like, are you also going to build a data center so that you can deploy your software and be in complete control of the hardware that is running all of the operating systems and the infrastructure that you need to scale up your app? And of course they say, no, that's crazy. I can just use the cloud. Why would I do that? And 10 years ago that is what you would have done. Or 15 years ago. Right. And now if I say I'm going to build a SaaS application, I'm going to build a data center that's going to take $40 million to put together because I'm going to order all the infrastructure and the building and the servers so I could scale up the application. People are going to look at me like I'm an alien. Right. But it's the same thing. You're giving away some of that control to a commercial proprietary company because of convenience. Right. And it's exactly the same with Harpoon. Like maybe you don't have to deploy your own Kubernetes cluster and maybe you don't have to write all the scripts to deploy your software on top of it. But that is the point. You don't have to do any of that. It's just taken care of for you. And we spent the last five years bulletproofing platform, so you don't need to call an engineer in the middle of the night. It just works.

Yep. And it's not necessarily like you're replacing a DevOps person per se. Like if you already have a DevOps team, it just frees them up to do some other things.

Yeah, I mean ultimately you can focus on building your software that is going to make you money and be successful. Successful versus writing underlying scripts that you can't sell to anyone or do anything with other than you have to continue to maintain them and make sure they don't break and pay a bunch of money to deal with that maintenance.

Yeah, it's in the aerospace world. It's like tooling.

Right.

In a sense that you just don't need. It's like all the mock ups and layups. That totally makes sense. And dev tools are just becoming more and more popular these days. There's so much of. It seems like an exploding area of building tools for developers from at least the startup tech world that are getting funded. So ultimately, did you get outside funding or have you self funded all the way?

Yeah, we Bootstrapped for about the first three and a half, four years. We wanted to build like a pretty serious product and start doing product market fit before, you know, we were looking for funding. Ultimately, I think what we found when we got to the point where we're going to start selling it in a serious capacity was that it is actually quite a bit of work to go. Even if you have a finished product, like it's not Field of Dreams, right. You can't just throw it out on the Internet and expect people to show up and use it and buy it. That'd be great, but I don't think it's reality. So we had to I. There's a lot of education on my side from like, how does marketing work and how does SEO work and how do you do sales and like how do you go out and get in front of people? So I've been on this learning crash course for the last year, I guess in all these different fields that I'm not really an expert in. And you find some people who are experts who maybe aren't the greatest at their trade and you hire contractors and you try to find people who have all these skills so they can teach you. But ultimately it's expensive to launch a product and we took a small seed round on purpose to sort of get over that hump and get the product out there. Got it.

Cool. So it's out there, it's live. Do people kind of use it? I guess they use it indefinitely, continuously for all future launches, in a sense, which is nice. What are any kind of interesting use cases? I don't know if you can name companies at all, so no worries if you can't. But like any interesting use cases of deployment.

Yeah, I can't name the current companies that we're working with right now. We're working on loosening some of those restrictions so we can start telling people all the people we're working with and share some of those use cases and stories. I think we spent a lot of time on the software platform itself. We took four years to go from a proof of concept to an enterprise grade platform. And the reason for that is we're building software that deploys other people's production software. So when we released beta, we knew that it had to be completely bulletproof because we certainly couldn't have people's software failing that was deployed on our platform in the middle of the night and be like, yeah, let me just, you know, make an update to our source code. It just wouldn't be feasible. So we really Hammered on creating a solid product so that you don't have to worry about any of those things. And we focused on a core set of functionality versus building a hundred different features that sort of worked. So that's kind of been the emphasis up until pretty recently. And now that the platform is pretty bulletproof, we're looking at different features to add. One of the customers that we have today, they actually do run out of a data center because of the security concerns of the field that they're in, which is payroll processing. They need to control the infrastructure that all their software runs on. And so we actually had to build out a new version of the platform that worked on prem as well. So we could do total white glove turnkey setup of the platform, which before was a SaaS platform running in the cloud, and then also like automatically deploy software that is locally. And it was actually a challenging task because it was a completely air gapped environment. So there's no Internet, there was no way to grab anything. So everything had to be totally self contained. So luckily we have really awesome team of people I've worked with over the years doing DevOps consulting and software consulting and we're able to complete completely poured the platform to on prem in only a couple months.

Wow, that's a big deal. Where do you see this going? Is the. I mean obviously you know, the industry like you mentioned is kind of shifting towards this of automation. What other factors do you think are going to have some tailwinds behind this is change And I mean even just like the remote work environment and hard to find talent, that's one area. Right. Where else do you think this is kind of the automation piece is going to grow? And where do you see harpoon in a year?

Yeah, I mean now people are talking about this concept called no ops and I think, you know, the real question is like is no ops a destination or a journey? So the concept of no ops is that somebody should be able to run all of the operations. So software infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, all the servers and everything without touching anything. Like it should just all be automated. And you're just like, I do a thing and I push my software and it just automatically deploys and everything's completely automated and if there's a problem the software will detect it and it will automatically remediate it. And you know, super fancy and futuristic. I don't think anybody's totally achieved no ops. Especially given the fact that a lot of software involved in DevOps itself and so by definition you're almost not doing no ops. If you have to write software or whatnot. But I think Harpoon is the one of the closest things I've seen to a no OPS platform because, you know, like, you don't have to write any YAML or configuration code to, to do anything is really just drag and drop. I mean the hardest thing you really have to do is maybe like type in a port number occasionally. And we built out some tooling to sort of detect when there are problems and like restart services that have stopped. So I think we're just for the platform itself. We're going to continue to iterate on that and make it more and more easy to use, make it more streamlined, more automation in the platform. So we're chasing that, that no OP stream. There should be a point in time we hope that you don't have to worry about anything related to ops. Harpoon will just detect it and understand it and know what to do with it. It's pretty sophisticated already as far as the level of what you can do without running any code and automation, because we can, even today we can dynamically deploy any software without any code or configuration. But yeah, I mean as we move into the future, it's just more and more automation. Whether that's just smart coding or adding in machine learning capabilities, your guess is as good as mine. We find the most elegant and precise solution to the problem we can. But yeah, like just continuing to push that automation track.

Yeah, you mentioned the thing you just said at the end about the elegance. You know, not everyone does everything in the shortest amount of code. So really just there's only more and more code coming out obviously. Right. Because more and more things are. Software's eating more of the world. So in that regard there are bigger and bigger opportunities for automation here. But it's not going to just like replace people. That's always the worry people talk about. And you actually mentioned this on a panel I had you on recently. Like doesn't just kill, it doesn't kill jobs. It frees people up to do like you said, stuff that affect the business, like make money off of the code. But the one other thing, and I'll end this interview here, automation does save time for you to go and leave and go grab some tacos. So code's running, compiling in the back or you know, it's actually doing its thing in the background. Team can go and get, go get tacos. Do you have a favorite spot that you do and go and grab or multiple spots?

Yeah, I mean being in San Diego with you here, Neil, it's Probably the hardest question I've ever been asked, you know, like there's so many good taco spots and I think, you know, like I'd have to narrow it down to two and it's like the age old question, surfer turf, you know. So if I'm just looking for the traditional best taco you can get get, I'm probably going to go to Tacos El Gordo. You know, like it's pretty, pretty solid spot, can't really go wrong. But as far as seafood is concerned, if you're looking for the best tacos, you definitely got to go to Oscars, you know, like they have the freshest seafood. I don't know, they've got the sprinkle magic dust on it or something, but that's where I'm going if I want seafood. So, yep, I hope it's good enough.

Oscars is a great one and there's a bunch, there's a few around. They used to have more, but I think they recently closed a few. But the PB one is kind of the original, I think the original or legendary one. And the ceviche, I always mention it, they're seafood ceviche for sure. Well, Don, this is great. It was great having you on. Great kind of learning alongside you, seeing you build harpoon. We've been actually working kind of alongside each other with another company, Cox Edge, in thinking through use cases for them and you helping them think through Edge use cases as well too. So it's been fun kind of learning alongside you. It's seeing kind of the bleeding edge of some of this technology being deployed, especially on the kubernetes in container space. So thanks for being on the pod. Thanks for building some automation to free up some people's time to go. More tacos and thanks again. Appreciate it.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much, Neil. I really appreciate the time. And let's definitely go get some tacos and beer soon.

Oh yeah, let's do it. All right, cheers. Thanks for tuning in to the Tacos and Tech podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshpeoptech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow Fresh Brew Tech on all of your social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech in tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it.

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Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos? Tacos and tech. You know we got it.

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