Scaling the Unscalable: The Defang Founders' Journey to Revolutionize Startups with Lio Lunesu, Prakash Sundaresan, and Antoine Cote of Defang

Three, two, one.

Good day, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Founder Journeys. My name is not Ray, the usual host of Founder Journeys. My name is Sam and I'm the VP of programs here at launch today. I'm batting relief for Ray as he's away on his travels. But I'm joined by this wonderful team here of founders, the D Fang team. Welcome, guys.

Thank you.

All right, most of you guys are going to be listening, I guess, audibly. So why don't we just do a round of introductions? There's three of you folks here.

Sure.

Hey, my name is Leo. I'm the CEO of defang, based out of Vancouver, moved here three years ago and yeah, this is going to be my third startup with these guys, so it's going to be awesome.

A lot of history, it sounds like.

My name is Antoine. I grew up in Canada, but I've been out of the country for a while. I've been in the us, Seattle, Shanghai, Hong Kong. Leo and I actually met while I was in Shanghai and we did different startups together. And now I'm back for another new venture.

Welcome back.

Thanks.

Yeah, and I'm Prakash. I work with these guys again. This is our third time together. We worked together at Microsoft, then in my previous startup, Trusted Key, which had a decent exit, and then time to do it again here in Vancouver.

Awesome. So, Leo, why don't you, just for the folks that are listening, never heard of D Fang. What are you guys trying to build?

Yeah, so our background is a mix of startups and corporate, big multinational software firms. Prakash has mentioned Microsoft. I worked at Workday for a bit, so has Prakash, Amazon, Anton and I met at Microsoft. Plus the startups that we've done, and we notice a lot of pain in building these products at scale. And big companies are able to do it. They have big teams, they have a lot of know how. And so we want to make it very easy for startups to get started and build products the right way without breaking the bank and be ready for the future. So resilient services, easier, cheaper, more resilient and scalable. Scalable, yeah, exactly. Like it's amazingly hard. You know, it's 2023. We've had cloud for what, a decade and a half, and it's still very hard to build those services out of all the services you have available to build your product. It's still very hard.

Yeah. So for the product folks that are listening, this is the episode that you want to make sure you're not missing. As we kind of talk about all the Things that have gone wrong in the past 10 years and how hopefully you guys can be out to fix it. But I just want to talk a little bit because just listening to even your brief intros here, you guys have been all around the world, you've worked for big companies, small companies. We threw out some of the cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Shanghai, a lot of places in Europe and of course Canada. How would you say these kind of global experiences work in each place? Or even maybe what are your favorite places you've worked out of? What have you picked up from. I don't know how to say culture, but the experiences of different product folks in those areas. Leo, we can start with you and then we can go on.

I'm sure everybody has a very different experience and different takeaways. For me, it's always very enriching experience spending years in a new place, a new culture, new languages to learn, new way of doing business, new way of doing things. So that alone I would recommend whether you'll have some bad experience, you'll have some good ones, but I look back at it fondly and you learn to deal with different peoples, like doing business. And I spent five years in Romania. Doing business in Romania is very different from doing business in China. And so those differences, yeah, you can leverage that when you're running your own business for sure.

And any one of you guys can take this, but would you say that when you're in a new place, obviously, like we, we obviously do a lot of global things in, at launch as well. When you go to a new place, like doing business is different. Some people want really snappy, really quick meetings. Other people want the meeting after the meeting, when the first meeting is just, you know, getting to know each other, things like that. Right, like, or maybe Antoine, I'll pick on you because you, you literally got off a plane a couple weeks ago or a couple days ago. Like how, how, how quickly do you pick up on, on, on how I guess locally business is done and like how are you reacting?

Yeah, that's a good point. Good question. I think when you put yourself outside of your day to day environment, that's why you start to realize these differences. So sometimes you may not realize whether it's just the personality of the people involved or there's a cultural aspect to it or other factors that come into play. But once I basically left, well, Canada and US was fairly similar in the ways of working. But once I moved to Shanghai, I started to realize some pretty big differences and appreciate the way that things were done in the US or appreciate way that things are done in Shanghai and try to make the best of both.

You know, what would you say is the biggest difference? I guess the east and the west from, from your perspective, business wise?

Well, so different factor. Like, one thing was interesting is so Microsoft was. We were building global products and these products didn't necessarily fit well in a Chinese market. So there was quite a struggle at the beginning. The things we were building and the things we were trying to sell, people just didn't understand why they should pay for this type of software. So we had to talk a lot about should we change what we're building, should we change our business model? And also, same with the way we were working with the engineering teams, like in the U.S. maybe there was. People were a lot more, I would say, happy to engage in hot debates and wouldn't shy away from conflict situations or when in China, we had to take a much more collaborative approach, which actually, to me, I also took the chance at the same time to ask my team to, to do our meetings in Mandarin. Even if I couldn't understand much at the beginning. But I started to write down, you know, all the words that I didn't understand. I would spend time at night to, to understand in Mandarin how you say different technical terms and then getting closer and closer to, to the team, you know, in their own language. I felt, you know, really helped to also bridge the.

How long would you say it took you to kind of get to a point where you're like, okay, I'm comfortable. Not. I mean, language is obviously the, the, the point, but I think it's beyond the language. It's like, o work with these folks and I can speak the language and it's just working now. Right? It's not like working to work.

Yeah, it took a lot longer than I thought because initially I started with some kind of a rotation program which was six months. And I thought, okay, during those six months, I'll do a big push and I'll be comfortable in Mandarin. And then the six months passed and I'm like, whoa, I still have a lot of work to do. So it took a few years, but I was making an explicit effort, like in every situation, going to a restaurant and shopping and at work and other, to really try to do everything as much as possible in Mandarin.

Yeah, that's good for you. Yeah. And Prakash, I know, like, you kind of managed a team while you were at Microsoft working with these guys and I'm assuming a couple others, like, what is it kind of like knowing that you have cross border teams and how is like managing whether it's product workflows or what was the experience like?

Yeah, it's. I mean, to your question, I think it's. There's definitely differences, right? Cultural differences. You can talk about communication and you know, from simple things like time zone, like when do you schedule meetings to, you know, whether you prefer like in person or as in like a live call or email or some kind of, you know, slack or whatever. But I think some of those, those are tools, right? But I think some of the other things that are more cultural, like many western companies, probably most of them, especially in software, you have this culture of, you know, bad news travels fast, right? Like you're working on a project, say it's slipping, something's not working, right. You want to escalate, you want to escalate quickly so people can see that and make decisions, right?

Yeah.

Should we delay the product launch or should we change the feature set or what should we do? Right. That doesn't always happen in other cultures, right. Where bad news is hidden and then by the time it surfaces, it's like too late, we're launching next week and now we figure out this thing doesn't work. Right. What do you do then? So I think to your point, like those are the kinds of things that take a while to first discover that that's a difference. And then to make people comfortable surfacing that bad news early, that's even harder. Right. It's a long time before they feel like, yeah, I won't be personally penalized for being the person that brings up the bad news. Right. So I think that can be. Yeah, it takes a while.

Yeah. And then, and then kind of drawing that back to what you guys are doing with Defang, right? Like obviously we'll talk a little bit more about the product in just a little bit. But you know, you're focused on servicing other product folks, right? And understanding that, you know, you guys have worked in all these various places. How are you prepping for understanding? Like, hey, the way products are built in China versus the States versus India or Europe, wherever else, like they may treat it differently. Like do you guys have a strategy or thoughts around that being so internationalized?

Yeah, maybe that I can take that. You know, I work, I didn't spend as long as I wanted to at Amazon, but I did spend a little bit of time there and a lot of great learnings from there. Right. I think one of the things that Amazon saying is like you can, instead of focusing on things that will change or things that are different across regions, you can focus on the things that are the same. Right. Across time and across region. So whether it's Europe or Asia or North America, where else Developers are developers, right. They want a platform that just works. They want it to be easy, they want it to be cheap to run, they want it to be resilient, they want it to be scalable. All those good things. Right? And that's what we are setting out to build is like a cloud platform that makes cloud apps easier to build, cheaper to run, more resilient to failures, scalable, all of those things. So instead of focusing on what's different, I think it's better we focus on the things that are common to all developers.

Got it.

That's really cool.

There is some expectation for all developers and all cultures what development is like. Development is very global. Everybody uses Stack overflow, everybody uses Google or Baidu, I guess, but everybody finds the same information, looking for the same information. So trying to solve the similar problems when it comes to building at scale.

And then just maybe a piece of advice before we kind of separate the topic. But what would you suggest for folks that are building things for people in multiple markets? What should be their strategy or any suggestions, advice you would give them?

Multiple markets, the cultures are definitely. So each product needs to consider localization, internationalization, all those things. When it comes to the actual platform, like Amazon doesn't have, other than Chinese data centers, they don't have a special Amazon Web services, it's all cloud. So that part might not be as culturally specific as much as the front end. Obviously there you want to design your front end for this specific market you're addressing.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the lower down you go in the stack, the more things are common. Right. Versus the higher up you're in the stack when you're closer to the user, whether that's a consumer product or an enterprise product, obviously that needs to be much more in tune with the. Whether that's the local regulations or the culture or how consumers behave. But we're mostly at the platform layer, so there's more in common than not in common.

Got it.

And anything to add, Anton?

Yeah, I mean, different types of products I've built over time, like things like Leo mentioned, localization, payment methods will be different. The laws around data, data retention, where the data is stored, will change from one country to another. So depending the products we built, also the ux, in some countries, people will expect different type of ux, different density of information. But in this case, like for this startup, we're building a platform which we think will apply globally and anybody can make use of it.

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely one of the biggest things that ux, now that you mentioned it, because every time we work with a lot of Chinese companies too, right. Like, their websites are so filled and it's something that works for them. Right. Whereas when you go to like a very North American, the classic SaaS website, it's always like clean, really, really giant text. Probably too giant if we're being honest. But the differences are big. And I don't think it's fair to assume just like, oh, because this is the way we're used to, then it naturally works in another way. And that's just looking at pictures in the front end. Right. But talking a little bit more about kind of that building that product. Obviously all of you guys are product folks, you're technical and I think you've also worked for bigdeckway throughout Microsoft, Amazon, those kind of experiences out there. What would you say is the difference between being a builder of something and now calling yourselves founders? What do you think is different?

There's different priorities. One thing that attracts me to being a founder is the scope of the task and the role. Like, I get to spend time on the product, I get to spend time on strategy, get to spend time on looking for customers. Like, who is my customer? You know, what does the ideal customer look like? We all have this seed of this is a problem that needs to be solved. We have the know how to solve it. How do we now market this? How do we convince people that this is a product to use? And so the scope of a founder's role is just immense. There's probably nothing more broad than that. Whereas if you, of course, if you're a builder, either in a big company or as a contractor, yeah, you're asked to build a certain thing and you build it. And depending on your role, you still have more or less to do with the strategy of that particular thing. But yeah, I think what attracts me is just the immense scope of the role.

What about you guys?

I would echo that also, like working in big companies, you can focus on an area which can be nice. You're going to go very deep and become develop an expertise and some technologies. As a founder and also working in startup companies, we have to cross the boundaries of roles a lot and we have to really understand our customers, make sure we have the right product. And I found that like having that even if you have a single customer right but you have that person who appreciates what you've built, you have that direct feedback loop from them is hugely valuable.

Yeah. And just to add to that, I think Microsoft, Amazon, these are all great companies, right. You can learn lots of great things. For example, our time at Microsoft, I think it was always one thing that was part of the culture, is like, do it right, build it with the right architecture for the long term. Because the customer base was so large and across the globe. Right. You don't want to ship something that's sort of not going to go very far, right?

Yeah.

So that's kind of a fundamental learning that I think we all carry from those days. Amazon, very customer focused, very fast, and also very operationally very sound. Right. I mean, just the scale at which they operate AWS and other services. So all those are great things. And if you're like, We've all built V1 products in big companies and you can say that's kind of like being a founder, but you really have all these advantages of you have an existing customer base, you have an existing infrastructure on which to build. Right. You have a marketing team, so you have all this help, Right. Versus as three founders, starting from nothing. You don't have any of that. So how do you compete? Right? So you have to think about like, okay, we don't have that, but what do we have? Right? We have the ability to move fast. Right. As startups, we can make decisions. We have a problem, we can get together in a room and make a decision. We don't have to run it up like three levels up the chain to get a decision in a month. Right. We can focus on the customer and really, if we have passion about this thing can be solved better. We can go build something that shows that it can be solved better.

Right? Yeah.

So I think as and we can react to what's happening in the market a lot faster than maybe a bigger company could.

Right.

Certainly people are getting better and better at being at big companies and still moving fast, but I think startups can still move faster. Right. So you got to kind of leverage those advantages that you do have as startups, for example. No big ones. Like, a lot of times companies slow down because they have a legacy to protect. They have an existing revenue stream to protect, you know?

Right.

We don't have a legacy revenue stream to protect. So we can be more disruptive in our thinking and kind of skate to where the puck is going.

Got it. And like, I think all three of you guys talked about, you know, finding that that problem Worth solving. And that kind of triggered something. I mean there's, there's sort of a debate, like in startups we talk a lot about like, you know, customer interviews, finding a problem worth solving, that kind of stuff. Right. And then there's, there's like guys like I'm going to use the biggest examples like Steve Jobs who, who was very adamant, like the customers don't know what they want because it hasn't been built yet. Right. Like that, that kind of concept. Right. And we can look through the history. When the iPhone was invented, it wasn't like nobody was asking for that. Right. Like they wanted something with a keyboard. So like as startups and especially in that early stage, how are you navigating not even customer feedback, but just like user feedback or your pure circle feedback or your intuition even versus like no, no, people need this because I've been working for 10 years. It sucked. It's always sucked. And we're just going to have to educate everybody to buy this in the long run. Like how do you kind of balance those two concepts? I know that was a long winded question.

Yeah, maybe I can take a first passive and you guys can. You know, I think customers are great at the stage that we are in, which is very early. They're great at expressing their problems and we should always listen to that. Right. And we've been on both sides of the fence in terms of being platform providers as well as being customers. So we have our own sort of personal history with challenges that we face when we work in a startup or we're building our own projects. And we've also seen it, why some of those problems manifest themselves when we are on the platform side of things. Right. Why things kind of get harder. So customers are great in terms of listening to them for the problems they're facing, but we shouldn't depend on them to design the solution. Right. That's the job of the founder. And finding that sort of breakthrough idea of how make things disruptively more simple. And then you can show it to a customer and say, okay, do you like this? And then they can give you more sort of fine grained feedback, right. Of what to tweak. But going from that problem statement to the solution, that's essentially the job of the founders, right?

Yeah. We're building a product where we want to be the customer of that product, but we have our own perspectives on it. Right. So we have ideas, but we also want to make sure that we include a broader group of people. So talking to customers, getting feedback and then Seeing the commonality, like the common problems they have, make sure that we integrate that into our solution to serve as many people as possible. I think is a good balance between, you know, coming up with our own ideas and also listening to people and then providing a solution that will work for everybody.

I'll add my 2 cents there. I think it's one of the hardest problems when you're a founder, you have this vision and how much do you stray from that vision to satisfy the customers that you can find? And then budget permitting, you keep building, but you don't want to build too much. Build it and they will come. That is a big risk. Not many people can pull that off. So that tug of war is one of the hardest things.

Yeah. And maybe if I just add a little bit to that, like, you know, you hear about like mission driven startups. Right. And I think the three of us, we've always worked on mission driven things, like even in our previous iterations. And I think that's at least my learning was doing a startup is obviously one of the hardest things you can do. Doing a mission driven startup is even more difficult. Right. Like when you're like, I want to solve this problem and it's a challenging problem. That's why we picked that problem. And so that makes it extra hard to make sure you can deliver not only from a technology point of view, but from a business model point of view and really get it out to being used. Right. Maybe we're just flawed in that way that we bang our head against the wall multiple times.

Yeah. And I know I'm kind of asking the questions reversed now, but what would you guys consider the mission of Defang to be today?

Well, at the start I put the short version, but yeah, I might be repeating myself. It should just be very easy for a small team to build like Facebook Twitter scale products that should not take a thousand people. And so how can we build platforms that allow 10 people to build a new Twitter if they wanted to?

Yeah. Another way to kind of think about that is like again, we've had AWS now for 15 years. We've had Azure for maybe 10 years, GCP and others. So there's a path that these products collectively have walked. Right. Starting kind of from virtual machines in the cloud to maybe more SaaS type of finished applications and then some layer in between. That's like more platform as a service pass. But there's really been a proliferation of individual services for individual problems. Right. And it's both good and bad. Right. You can find a very large tool set out there. But as a developer, you have to be sophisticated enough to find the right tool for your job, right?

Right.

So one question that sometimes we ask and kind of how we look at it from defang point of view is like if you were starting today and offering not the hardware, not the sort of scaled out data centers across the world, but a software platform for building cloud applications, what would that look like? Would that look like something that has the legacy of the 15 years? Or could you do something better if you started today? Right. So that's kind of the perspective we're trying to bring.

Gotcha.

Cool.

And then kind of again, going in reverse, why did you guys decide to first start this but also work together? Because we've been talking for about 20 minutes. Obviously you guys have done startups in the past, I presume some of them have gone well, some of them maybe not so well. But now you're back at it again for in your case, at least your third run. I lost count of how many times you guys have done this startup thing, but like why? Why this and why together?

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Maybe we'll start with cash and we'll go backwards this time.

Yeah. Like I said, maybe we just like the punishment, you know. No, I think, you know, maybe many people in your audience have read that book going from 0 to 1. If they haven't, they should as a startup founder, and I think that's a challenge that I think we all appreciate is how do you go from a blank sheet of paper where we have a sense of the problem, but not maybe necessarily a great sense of the solution? Right. And I think it's a very good saying. The job of a founder is to find that product market fit. And I think we bring different skill sets to that problem. The three founder team has things like, you want somebody to be the visionary, somebody to be the hacker hustler visionary. You see all those tropes out there, but I think those are true. You want different founders with different skill sets and hopefully a team that you enjoy working with. I think that's something that we have in common. We worked together a couple of times in the past. We did, you know, we enjoyed our time together. And because it's. You're spending a lot of time together as a startup founders, right?

Yeah.

Probably more time with the team than with your family. So you better like to hang out with the folks that you're going to build something valuable with.

Yeah. Can you ask, like, why this. And I remember while we were working on our previous startup, we were talking about other potential ideas and problem spaces that we would like to address and the ability to build applications for the cloud fairly easily and quickly. Even though we have a lot of experience building all kinds of products on the cloud and different cloud platforms, we still find it very difficult. And in my previous company, just before this venture, I was working with large teams of specialized people, like teams of developers, teams of DevOps. We had data center infrastructure engineers. Even for these large teams of experts, I could see they were spending an amazing amount of time trying to set things up just to have the basic foundation to be able to build a product. So, yeah, we thought that's something that we've been challenged by. And we see a lot of companies being challenged. So there's definitely a lot of value going and solving that problem. And we already had a number of ideas, like, we know we can make it better, you know, for sure. And then working together, I think We've known each other for quite a long time. We've worked on different types of companies and products and we had built good trust relationship, good working relationship and like Prakash said, complementary skillset also that goes well together for anything that you need to do to seed things and get the company up and running.

So yeah, the complementary skill set is definitely something I would call out for the three of us. Different personalities, different strengths, that really helps. I think it was a CEO of Toyota that said if two people always agree, one is superfluous. There's a quote like that.

Oops, sorry.

I agree.

So yeah, I think we have some heated debates here and there which I think are necessary to iron out the kinks. And why this? Yeah, Anton touched upon it. Anton and I had a contracting business and we were building products for other companies, precautious startup being one of them. And we just saw each company, they do not have the in house knowledge to build it themselves. They have to go to a contractor or something to build that base to build that initial stage of the product. And then us doing that, we'll see so many commonalities, right? Everybody has resiliency problems, everybody wants scale, everybody wants it as cheap as possible.

And.

Solving for all those parameters is just very hard. And part of it is what Prakash mentioned is just 15 years of legacy. So let's build a cloud platform like almost from scratch, leveraging what we have now. But let's not seep this into the new modern applications. This 15 year of legacy that I think is a very interesting problem to work on.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I'll preface this by saying like obviously at the time of recording right now, like there's a lot of layoffs everywhere, right? Obviously we've been hit very hard in tech, but even outside tech, like we look at all the retail stores closing things like that with that brings new opportunity. Maybe there's folks that are listening right now thinking hey, maybe I should get a shot at being a founder. What advice would you give for them? Whether it's looking for other co founders or just do you actually want to do this? What would you tell them?

I would tell them to wait maybe six months until they can leverage our platform.

Might be five months by the time we go to print.

Right?

So this is a frustrating thing to me. A lot of people with great ideas, a lot of those ideas they have involve software. And now these people with great ideas end up building a software company from scratch. And they do not have a software background. They rely on a technical co Founder to build the team. And so all these startups being software companies in the end is pretty sad because I think most of them are not great at building software, but that is just a necessity. Everything has software in it nowadays. So yeah, I would love for them to be able to leverage our product and focus on their particular domain or what they're experts at. And that's why we don't have the platform yet. But it is something that those startup founders, one of the customer profiles we're.

Going after, if they promise to leave five stars like and subscribe. Can you do it in three?

A little bit with shortcuts now, probably not a good idea.

Do it anyway. If you're listening.

You know, I would say doing a startup, at least for me, my experience was it's the hardest thing I've done professionally. Right. So it's just there's obviously going to be ups and downs, there's just going to be unexpected challenges, especially the environment we're in right now, you know, you know, who knows what happens with the economy in the coming months. Right. So for people who are thinking about, should I be a first time founder? Yeah, at some point you are a first time founder.

Right.

But make sure you are ready for maybe the toughest professional experience of your life. And by that I would make, you know, but I would mean like make sure you're on sound footing otherwise in your personal life, maybe in your financial life. Because it's hard to do a startup, it's even harder if you have other stuff going on that's not settled in your life. So it's almost like clear the decks, make sure you're in a good spot and then do it with people that ideally you've worked with before. Again, this is a journey that is going to be super tough. So to be on the journey with people you never worked with before, you don't know how they're going to react with their tolerance for, you know, hard work is, or, you know, instability is, or ambiguity is. You don't want to be finding that out in the middle of this journey. So ideally do it with people that you work with before you get along with them. You may have different skill sets, but you understand how the other person or persons work. Right. That be kind of my advice from the learnings that we've had.

Where I've had, yeah, like starting something new, creating something out of, you know, not from scratch is a big time commitment. So personally, I think being passionate, like having genuine interest in that problem space and what you're Doing so you can wake up every day motivated to go and work hard on it. It helps for these long hours, you know. And yeah, I agree with what percussion Leo said also. So.

More of a personal question, how did you guys families take it when they were like, oh, I'm going back in the game.

Oh, well, in my case, my wife quit her banking, well paying banking job in Hong Kong to do a PhD in Vancouver, by the way. So to leave like a well paid job to do something completely different is kind of a thing in our family, I suppose.

So you guys are both going for it. So you can't blame the other.

Exactly. You can't blame me. She was first.

Yeah, I think my wife was very understanding. As long as I'm doing something I like, then it's because you're a more.

Pleasant person when you're doing something you like.

Yeah, maybe I'm out of the house more. Maybe, I don't know.

Yeah, I would say exactly the same things. Like, you know, I took a little bit of a break before this and by the time we started this, my wife's like, hey, great, you know, go spend some time doing something else. Get you out of the house. Yeah, yeah, that's funny.

My wife does say that she thinks I'm a much better mood now than I was at my previous corporate job. I think personally the speed with which things change in a big company, there's just a huge inertia getting a lot of people to agree on something. Yeah, it wears me down. Personally, I would much rather be spending time on building and throwing it away if it doesn't work and build it again.

It sounds like a big part of it for all three of you is that kind of old idiom like the journey is the reward. It sounds like, you know, obviously, and both of you, all of you have had experience in exits and things like that, but there, there has to be something, you know, some sort of delight while you're not like exited or you're not IPO'd or whatever the target success is.

Yeah, I mean we are pretty realistic about it, right? Like for a startup to be successful, the odds are not great. Like you're better up, especially us in the technical domain. We're still better off taking a well paid job at one of the big names. But yeah, for sure, like working with people that you choose that you love to work with on problems that you choose that you love to work on. That is a huge privilege.

When you asked about tips, I do think another one is to have co founders at least doing a startup alone, you face a lot of situations, and I think it's useful to have other people who you can talk to and support each other, or if it's not as co founders, at least having an initial core group of people that work well together and can fight that battle.

Yeah. And if you read social media, you know, sometimes it's like everybody else is being so successful. That's the impression you might get. Right. Especially as founders. And obviously the journey is much tougher than that. Right. I think we're getting better as a community to share some of the challenges, but also like the not so successful outcomes and not feel bad about that, because it is. I mean, if people only measure their success by whether they had a exit in the end, yeah, that's one metric. But if that's the only metric, I think, you know, that's a problem, right?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, you know, looking at all three of your resumes, all the stuff you guys have done, like, why did you choose to do defang here? And you know, we're recording here in Vancouver, like, why? Why Vancouver? Why now? I feel like I know your answer a little bit. You didn't have a choice. But. But maybe I'll start with those guys first and then we'll come back to you.

Maybe you should go first.

Yeah, maybe I'll go first. You know, we've lived and worked in many places as we've discussed previously. Right. And I think, like three of us first met in China when we were there in the. I would say in the 2010 time frame. And I was there for seven years from 2007-14, and the iPhone was released in 2007, and I think that really lit a fire under the software in general. But the startup ecosystem in China at that time, and you can just literally see as people around, or more and more people had phones, the app ecosystem really started to take shape and the startup ecosystem started to take shape, and that cloud was also happening at that time. So both trends coincided and you could see this sort of energy in those cities, whether you were in Beijing or Shanghai or wherever else. And of course, the Valley has always had that energy. Seattle has had that energy. But I would say at this point, you can see that energy in a lot of places, specifically here in Vancouver and in Canada in general, where there's enough critical mass of talent that almost every big company has an office in Vancouver, and there's people who work at those big companies that can now form that talent pool to go do startups. And you know, and that sort of quality of life aspect is here as well, plus kind of the favorable, I would say, like immigration policies or, you know, all of the other stuff that makes up a good startup ecosystem. So when I was looking, you know, I spent a lot of time in Seattle area, but when I was looking to set up the next company, I thought, okay, why not do it in Vancouver? I've been coming here for 25 years just as a tourist, but I've got a place next to here and got, you know, Leo was here. I knew, you know, Antoine being Canadian, so this seemed like the perfect spot to do that.

Yeah, I've been outside of Canada for a long time, but I, it was always in the back of my mind that I would want to come back at some point. And Vancouver actually was kind of my first choice for a number of reasons. And I remember when Leo and I were in Hong Kong, I was already telling him, yeah, Vancouver's nice, eventually go back there. But then he beat me to it, you know. Right.

Do you think in from, from more the tech ecosystem perspective, like, and I know you've only, you know, been back for, for a hot minute, like, do you see any initial differences from, from the place you left to, to coming back now?

Yeah, it's changed a lot. I think when I first moved to Seattle and I spent a bunch of time in the US and outside.

If.

You wanted to do a startup and have investors, the whole startup ecosystem was pretty much just in the Valley and even in Seattle it was difficult and Vancouver was difficult too. And over time I saw Seattle became a much better hub and then Vancouver became a much better hub for a number of reasons. Also when I was at Microsoft, the company started to open up more positions here because it was easier to get people to get work visas and settle down in Vancouver than it was to try to bring them into the US eventually more and more companies joined that group. Now I actually think there's a great ecosystem of builders and startups and other. There's good co working spaces, you know, maker spaces. And.

Yeah, immigration was touched upon, definitely shaped my decision. As somebody that has pretty much moved to a different country every five, six years. Immigration is always, always a hassle. I never finished my college diploma. My first startup was in college. So, you know, getting, getting work permits is a has. It's always a pain. But yeah, Vancouver was quite, quite easy. It was easy for my wife to get settled here, she's from Hong Kong. Easy for me to get a work permit. We got our PR So, you know, the path to PR is pretty straightforward. That is very attractive. So the first time I get to live a few years or who knows how long in an English speaking country, I think that is pretty nice. Get rid of my Nordic accent.

I don't know, I feel like your Chinese still might be useful here.

Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure.

That's true.

I get to practice, actually, I get to practice more here than in Hong Kong.

But I should say thank you to launch, actually, for the ecosystem that you guys have helped to create here. I think that's been very helpful for Defang and all the other founders that are here.

Yeah, that lowers the bar so much. Getting accepted, meeting people with similar challenges, not just immigration, also technical challenges, founding a company in a place where you're new. So, yeah, that's very helpful.

Appreciate that, guys. We've really enjoyed having you guys here and I know I kind of buried the lead, but folks listening, three months, four months, five months from now, how can they get access to Defang?

Yeah, we're working on our mvp. Hopefully launch in early next quarter. And yeah, watch the launch space, the launch channel. We'll definitely make sure we'll announce it broadly. But that MVP might not be, I would say play with it, give us feedback. But that should be the beginning of the next platform that you would want to use.

So we're looking at summer, fall 2023, something like that.

Something like that. Make it summer.

Leo's downplaying this. It's going to be the greatest invention since the iPhone. You heard it here first. No pressure, guys.

It's modest.

No pressure.

It was awesome having all of you here. Really appreciate your time and rolling down to our studio here. We'll be back with another episode really soon. You'll have your regular host. So the relief pitcher is signing off now. But yeah, if you haven't already, make sure to like and subscribe and share this podcast. I think a lot of folks that are building things want to hear from these guys over here. So do us a favor and make sure you're sharing it and go check out dfang. Thanks so much, guys.

Thanks.

Thanks for having us.

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