Pamela FurstSenior Manager, Customer Success

The Concept of Jellyfish | Andrew Lau (Jellyfish CEO & Co-Founder)

Name: The Concept of Jellyfish | Andrew Lau (Jellyfish CEO & Co-Founder)
Uploaded: 2021-11-08T15:00:08+00:00
Duration: 1 min 56 s
Channel: Pamela Furst
Description: In this segment, Andrew Lau, co‑founder and CEO of Jellyfish, explains how the company’s core concept emerged from a candid discussion among the founders…

8 Nov 2021 · 2 min

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In this segment, Andrew Lau, co‑founder and CEO of Jellyfish, explains how the company’s core concept emerged from a candid discussion among the founders about their reluctance to lead engineering. He describes the chronic friction between business and engineering, characterized by “trust‑me” decisions and frequent yelling, and draws a parallel to the evolution of sales metrics—how the advent of CRM tools like Salesforce transformed sales from a trust‑based, uninstrumented function into a data‑driven discipline. Recognizing this gap, the founders asked why engineering lacked a comparable system to surface real‑time work data, leading to the creation of Jellyfish as a platform to instrument engineering work, reduce conflict, and enable better decision‑making.

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People always ask us, how did we actually come up with this concept of Jellyfish? So it goes back to when we actually were sitting there together as co-founders and trying to figure out what roles we're going to play. And I think two of us kind of looked at each other and said, like, I don't want to run engineering. I don't want to run engineering. And, well, why not? It's like, well, 'Cause it sucks. Why does it suck? Well, it's because everyone's always yelling at you. And we're like, well, let's start unrolling that. Why is everyone always yelling at you? Well, it's because they don't understand. Business and engineering are often historically at odds. They don't understand how the two kind of fit together. And so the net result is a lot of just trust me and some yelling. And that same conversation, we quickly said, well, actually, this is actually how sales was in the late '90s when we started our career. I think people forget, I think everyone assumes today that metrics are ubiquitous in sales. It is the most hyper-instrumented department. We know how many phone calls have to happen, we know how many meetings, we know what the pipeline looks like 3 quarters out, we know what's gonna happen and how things are looking in a healthy way or not. But you have to remember, 2 decades ago, it was a cell phone and a notebook and trust me, I got the quarter, right? And eventually, you didn't have the quarter. I got the quarter. And it's easy to forget that that evolution only came about because of things like Salesforce. When they arrived in '04, by the time you moved to 5 years later, every company's running a CRM and had rich data on the sales side to answer these questions. But before then, it was an open-ended, trust me, I got the quarter. And so we posed at that moment, well, why can't we do this for engineering? Why isn't there a system that actually helps us understand what's actually happening on the engineering side so that we can make better decisions and so there's less yelling?