Scale Your SaaS
Scale Your SaaS
317: On Startup Mistakes, Successes, and $82M in Funding - with Ozan Unlu
EPISODE SUMMARY
In this week’s episode of Scale Your SaaS, Ozan Unlu, founder and CEO of Edge Delta, shared insights into his journey and the innovations driving his company with host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach.
With a background that spans leadership roles at tech and aerospace giants like Microsoft, Boeing, and Sumo Logic, Ozan's expertise is undeniable. He's raised an impressive $82 million in venture capital for Edge Delta and collaborated with industry leaders like Cisco and American Airlines. Let's delve into Ozan's story, his vision for Edge Delta, and the invaluable lessons he's learned along the way.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach
Episode: Episode No. 317, “On Startup Mistakes, Successes, and $82M in Funding - Ozan Unlu”
Guest: Ozan Unlu, Founder & CEO at Edge Delta
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Sponsored by: Leadfeeder
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
- Navigating the Startup Landscape
- Fundraising Wisdom
- Sustainable Growth: Focus on steady, sustainable growth rather than rapid expansion. This approach helps maintain efficiency and balance within the team, allowing for more controlled and effective scaling.
- Entrepreneurial Mindset: Hire individuals with an entrepreneurial mindset who can adapt and thrive in a dynamic environment. These team members will be instrumental in navigating challenges and driving the startup forward.
- Strong Co-Founder Relationship: Having a co-founder or a supportive partner can make a significant difference during tough times. This partnership provides balance and shared responsibility, making the journey more manageable.
- Network and Seek Help: Utilize your network for support, feedback, and introductions. Don't hesitate to ask for help and leverage connections to overcome challenges and achieve your goals.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
- The Birth of Edge Delta
TOP QUOTES
Ozan Unlu
[09:52] "I would say my biggest piece of advice would be make sure you are thinking about going into and building a company in an area that you do have very deep, intimate knowledge."
[19:47] "Don't be afraid to reach out to your network, even people that you haven't talked to in years. Just reach out and say Hey, I'd love your thoughts on something. Or I'd love your feedback"
Matt Wolach
[22:48] “I echo the co-founder statement. Having great partners is critical. It's so cool how they can pick you up on those bad days, how they can help you through the tough times how you can work on it together and just create this amazing bond”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Edge Delta, visit: https://edgedelta.com/
You can also find Ozan Unlu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ozanu/
For more about how Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.
Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free tri
Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:
Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, so glad that you can make it. By the way, if this is your first time here, we are here to help you do exactly that scale your sass. So let's generate some awesome leads, let's make sure we know how to close those leads. Let's understand how we can scale a team to do this for us. And let's make our company amazing. So we have an incredible valuation, we can sell this thing. If you want any of those, definitely subscribe right now hit that button. That way, you're gonna get all of the episodes where we build amazing leaders who have done this or helping you do this so that you know exactly how to Scale Your SaaS and one of those awesome leaders. I am so excited to talk with today. I've got Ozan Unlu with me. Ozan, how you doing?
Ozan:Good. Good. How are you, Matt?
Matt Wolach:I'm doing great. Thank you for asking. I am looking forward to our conversation, especially after hearing some of the things that you're you're focused on in our pre conference session here. Now, let me make sure everybody knows who you are Ozan. So Ozan, he's the founder and CEO at Edge Delta. His journey encompasses leadership at edge delta, which is an automated observability platform. And he did these great notable roles at Tech and aerospace giants like Microsoft, Boeing and sumo logic. He's got some awesome experience. He's also raised 82 million in VC for Edge Delta, and collaborated with industry leaders, such as Cisco and American Airlines. Ozan brings so much experience guys, you're gonna really love hearing from him. This edge delta is a cool thing, too. It's an observability platform. It's really innovative. And it's revolutionizing how businesses process route and understand observability data. So Ozan, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Ozan:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited for the chat. Me too.
Matt Wolach:So tell me what's been going on with you lately? And what do you have coming up?
Ozan:Yeah, I've been doing a lot of traveling. Actually, a lot of lot of customer on sites, a lot of events, a lot of, frankly, a lot of interviewing, as I think at a startup you always have to be doing and so yeah, excited to I think I think next week, I don't I don't travel at all. So I'm here in Seattle and home base. And you know, from from Edge Delta perspective, I think that lets me kind of settle in and kind of focus back on the the product sales and all the different parts of our company that maybe I feel like I'm neglecting when I'm always on flights.
Matt Wolach:Yeah, it's it's so crazy. Being a CEO and a leader like yourself, you are all over the place. And you're right, I love that you said this mode of you've got to constantly be recruiting and constantly have that idea of who's next to join our team. I think that's super smart. With the companies that I've been a part of, and I've run that have done the best, we've always had that kind of same mindset of who's, who are the next great people that that we can bring on board. So I love that you're thinking about that. That's cool.
Ozan:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, sometimes there's, there's this, I would say, bad habit of, you know, you go fundraise, you go hire a bunch of people, and then you kind of try to normalize and then fundraise and hire a bunch of people. And, you know, I think we kind of fell into that trap a little bit earlier, as well, which is, I think in one year, we had 6x, the company, and it just, it ultimately was too much. And I think you know, if you can kind of be in that mindset of, you know, hey, we constantly need to be adding, but also, every single time we're adding that means a lot of people are being pulled off projects and interviewing, a lot of people are being pulled off of projects and onboarding, and training and all sorts of other things. And so, if the ratio does get a little bit too wonky, you know, I think it does put a little bit too much chaos. I think every startup should have a little bit of chaos. But but you know, too much then ends up being fairly inefficient.
Matt Wolach:Yeah, I totally believe that. So tell me, how did edge Delta come to be? I mean, it's really cool, what you've done, but what inspired you to create this?
Ozan:Yeah, so I mean, I've been working on monitoring technologies for, you know, almost 20 years, even before edge delta. And then, you know, one thing that I saw in the space that, you know, might sound like a cliche is really the data growth. You know, when when, if we look back at, you know, 2010, or even 2012, the average customer that was looking at real time streaming datasets from their mission critical systems might have been looking at, you know, five or 10 gigabytes of data per day. And now that's turned into even some mom and pop shops are, you know, five or 10 terabytes of data, and then some large enterprises are at, you know, five or 10 petabytes of data. So, you know, I think when people are looking at, hey, the data is growing, and it's growing at a pace of, you know, 40 or 50%, every single year. You know, I think that's if you take the exact same server, you know, and you and you leave it over there in the corner. And yes, the data on that server just from the the normal growth and traffic on the internet might be growing at 40 50%. But realistically, that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing organizations that are moving to, you know, microservices architecture. yours or Kubernetes are containerization. You know, they're doing multi cloud strategies, they're doing a lot of things that actually make that number a lot larger. And I would say, you know, over a 10 year horizon, that growth and data might be like, even, you know, 1,000,000x or 10,000,000x, for various different businesses. And so, you know, Edge Delta really was the understanding that, hey, not only from a technical but also from a financial perspective, that puts a lot of limitations and bottlenecks on on these businesses. And in the future, when you know, every organization is creating petabytes, and petabytes of data. How would you deal with your logs, metrics and traces like, you know, the old approach of just, hey, let's put it all into a bucket. And then let's search and dashboard and alert on that bucket that works at smaller datasets, you know, a larger data set, you have to be a lot more thoughtful about how is that data being pre processed, how it's being transformed? How is it being routed? Once it's stored? How are you organizing that data in various different indexes. And so edge delta is really about that. It allows you to take full control and understanding of your datasets from end to end. And it also enables what we're seeing in the industry of certain strategies that organizations are taking, such as data tearing, where they're saying, hey, not every single piece of data needs to go through the exact same pipeline, and needs to incur the exact same cost for my business, there are high value data sets and low value data sets. And some of them need to be more kind of processed in real time. Some of them can be archived to take a look at later. And so edge Delta really enables that entire new kind of modern approach.
Matt Wolach:I love it. I love it. I mean, it's so that means way above my paygrade. But it's super cool what you guys are doing. I know that super important with your right, like, when you talk about all this amount of data out there, it gets pretty crazy. So how can a business? How can everybody listening out there equip themselves to handle these challenges, these data challenges that, you know, really are struggle so that they can have that sustainable growth? Can you help us with some actionable insights?
Ozan:Yeah, I mean, look, you know, traditionally, if you if you didn't have a ton of data, you could put it into kind of a one size fits all tool, where we say, hey, you know, if, like, I'll use an example. So data dog is one of the largest players in the space, they have good technology, they have a good team. And realistically, if you have five or 10 gigabytes of data, as the average person had 10 years ago, you could foreseeably just put all that into data dog, your data dog bill might be, you know, whatever, five or $10,000 annually, and you just eat that cost, you'd say, hey, look, you know, for a small startup, that's, you know, it's not cheap. But that being said, it's whatever 1/10 or 1/20 of a headcount. So it's just not a big enough problem for me to solve. Well, that's not the reality today. So the reality today is you have a lot of a lot of large datasets, you might be architecting, directly in, you know, Eks, which is Kubernetes, on AWS. And so in that instance, you do want to go implement an observability platform, that can give you those real time insights that can give you understanding of your logs, metrics and traces and not break the bank. And so that's kind of where edge Delta comes in, is, by default, we have been engineered for the very large scale very large scale datasets. And so, you know, even if you had that large data set, that's where the next question that comes up, even if you had a small dataset, like let's say, for instance, you had only five or 10 gigs of data today. It's like, also, you know, the question comes up of, do you really want to go take a potential one way decision to go onto a platform that's going to be very heavy and expensive to go move on to another platform later on? Or do you want to kind of go with an edge Delta style kind of next generation observability toolset that lets you see all that stuff in real time. And when I talk about, you know, looking at that stuff in real time, it means, hey, are my mission critical systems up and running? When my customer wants to go to my, my product or my website and go look around? Is it functioning? Is it performance? Is it reliable? Is it available, you know, all of these things that, you know, even for a small organization, you are constantly trying to stay on that kind of curve of, you know, slow and steady, are we 1% better than we were the day before? And every day matters? And every day counts for that?
Matt Wolach:Yeah, I totally agree. It's so cool, what you're doing and you talk about some of the growth that you've had happened. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of smart people who believe in you because you've raised a really impressive $82 million so far. And so a lot of our listeners are definitely trying to raise money themselves. So what unique lessons do you felt like you learned throughout that fundraising journey? And maybe around investor scrutiny even?
Ozan:Yeah, yeah. So I'll use an example there. So you know, I I can't stand dealing with insurance. You know, hopefully, hopefully my insurance providers aren't aren't aren't listening to this. But, you know, it's just, you know, you have to, you have to basically be angry, and you have to push and their default is to basically reject and deny everything, I would love to go and do a startup in the insurance space, and go and try to improve that, you know, all like what Mark Cuban or other people are trying to do, right. But that being said, I don't know, the first thing about insurance, I've never worked in insurance, I don't have any, you know, intimate knowledge about insurance. So I would say to the listeners out there, it'd be a very bad idea for me to go, even if I was trying to say no, but like, I have a tech background. So I can, I can take tech to insurance, I would say my biggest piece of advice would be make sure you are thinking about going into and building a company in an area that you do have very deep, intimate knowledge. And, and for me, it was it was it was technology and data and specifically, you know, monitoring and observability. Right. And so, you know, I think that's probably the biggest tip I can give is, why are you the person in the entire world that has a unique insight, something that all the other people in the space haven't really thought about? And, and, you know, it's really important to understand that you do have to be an expert in the field, to then go and iterate on the previous platforms with the previous technologies in that field. So that would probably be my number one piece of advice is, you know, make sure whatever you've done, up until now, make sure that has has led to you having a unique insight and experience and, and really, that you're an expert in the field, so that you can reliably go and make that next iteration. You know, for me, if I weren't, you know, going back to the insurance example, I would have to go in and learn the basics and insurance. And, you know, yes, I could go listen to a few YouTube videos and, and try to read a few books. But realistically, nothing's gonna go and replace, you know, years and years of being in an industry and understanding it. And when I say years and years, by the way, it doesn't mean also that if you're a younger generation, that you can't go find something amazing, right? Like, I would say, the younger generation is, you know, I haven't really been on social media now. Except for LinkedIn, which is, you know, obviously something I have to be on, and Twitter X. But like, otherwise, I haven't really been on LinkedIn much. So, you know, if someone wants to come in and be a social media influencer, they're gonna be, you know, 100 times better than, than me at doing that. Right. So, you know, I think it just comes down to what are your skill sets? What are you very good at? What do you understand better than, you know, 99 out of 100 people on the street, and really ensuring that you are going into that area, and you have the ability to go innovate in that area?
Matt Wolach:Yeah, I think that's super smart. It's a it is tough. When you try and start something, you try and do something that you don't really have a lot of understanding of what's going on. So I think that is really good. Do you find investors? Key on that? Are they asking you about your past experience, even before you started this when they're when they're looking at you for a possible investment? Yeah,
Ozan:I think so. I mean, you know, the three big things we talk about is the founding team, you know, we look at the market, right? And, you know, really from there, it's, it's a little bit about, you know, for this, this founding team, you know, what, what gives them that unique insight. And, you know, I would say, if you look at, you know, if you look at the founding team, and even for if you're starting the fundraising process, and you're looking at templates for for pitch decks, my, my advice is always going to be for the seed pitch deck or the precede pitch deck, you always got to have your founding team up front at the top of the deck. And the reason being is that I've seen a lot of these pitch decks for seed where, you know, and by the way, like, unfortunately, the way the world works is, if you're doing a series a or Series B, or Series C, you've already kind of jumped through that hoop of having already fundraised, so it becomes less important. But at the beginning, anything you say about the problem statement, or anything you say about your actual idea, the investor is always going to have in the back of their head, and they're gonna say, Well, who is this that's actually making this claim? Who is the person that's claiming all these things? Who are the people that's claiming all these things? And so realistically, you know, again, if, if you go back to the three of, of, you know, the team and in the market, and then what's the unique insight, you know, maybe there's a fourth, which is the idea itself, but the investors are really not going to hone in too much on that idea. First of all, you know, they don't have intimate knowledge of the space. And second of all, we all know that idea evolves over time, right? The also don't, don't kill yourself coming up with the perfect idea down to the minut detail, because realistically, you're gonna be learning things through the process. You're gonna be going and getting feedback from early design partners. So yeah, I would say, number one, first and For most amongst everything else is make sure the team is up in that in that kind of early, early part of your slide deck, they understand what your background is. And they can formulate in their minds this belief that you could be that person that actually has a unique insight in the space that nobody else has. Yeah,
Matt Wolach:I think that's huge. Investors always are looking at the team, the blood, you invest in people you buy from people, they're wanting to make sure that you and your team, absolutely know what they're doing, and somebody that they can put their money behind that they believe it's going to work out. So thinking back through your journey of this growth that you've gone through, what would you say? Those are some of the best decisions you guys have made? What are the best things you guys have done that helps you accelerate and get ahead?
Ozan:I think early on some of the best decisions we made, and some of the best hires we made are people that have an entrepreneurial mindset. You know, I think, you know, when you talk about in the early stages of a company, you want kind of the jack of all trades, and then later on, you want kind of specialists, I would say, you know, even as you scale, ensuring that people have the mentality of an entrepreneur mindset is probably one of the best decisions we made is to bring on board people like that. And so, and it's even a decision that we're kind of renewing. Now is that, you know, obviously, it's been a tough market for startups for the last couple of years. And you do want people that, you know, I think what was it it was Elon Musk the other day a video came out about him. And I think he was saying, for startups, it's like, staring into the abyss and chewing glass, something along those lines. So you know, that's true, right? I think, you know, especially in a tough market, or, you know, every startup is going to have phenomenal days, and they're gonna have dark days, you do want to make sure that you surround yourself with people that do have that mentality of hey, not every day is going to be, you know, popping bottles of champagne and choosing and having fun, and you know, partying, right? Sometimes it really feels like you know, hey, the party's over. Like we got we got it, we got to get back to work. So, you know, ensuring that you have people with that mindset. And with kind of that entrepreneurial hustle. That was probably one of the best decisions we made early on.
Matt Wolach:Yeah, I love that. And it's so important, especially for a startup in that early day. Those first few hires those early hires, they're not working a standard nine to five job like they would be if they went to work for some giant deal. It's it's a, it's Bootstrap. And they're basically like founders, they have to have that entrepreneurial mindset to want to make it happen. I totally agree. That's kind of what I have felt as an early leader in startups. It's what I've felt when I've hired people as the founder myself. It's absolutely critical. And I think that, that's, I'm glad that you guys were able to find some of those great people. So that's some of the good stuff. What about some of the bad things? What were some of the things you look back on? You're like, Oh, I wish we didn't do that. Yeah, I think,
Ozan:you know, what I'd mentioned before is probably the number one thing is, I think, steady scaling, and growing, is going to be so much more powerful and sustainable than kind of this, you know, you know, popping every single time you get get funding, right? So I think, obviously, that's hard, right? At a startup, sometimes you don't know where you gonna be next year, sometimes you don't know where you gonna be next month, right. So it is difficult. But you know, one of the things that really slowed us down when we went into kind of this, quote, unquote, hyper growth mode would be, you know, when you when you are saying, hey, every team needs to go to x 3x 4x. In a matter of, you know, a few months, everyone pretty much stops working, and it's not their fault. They're just all of a sudden, they're being pulled to go into interviews multiple times a day into, you know, scouring their network to see if you know, there's some high performers that they can pull from, you know, other projects and other areas. And so, you know, I would say that's probably the biggest mistake we made is, you go into this, and all of a sudden, you're looking, you're looking into your product roadmap, and you're like, Well, why isn't this stuff progressing as much as I'd like it to? And so, you know, I think, being being healthy and balanced. And making sure that you're always hiring and always building the team, in a nice, structured and scalable way, is probably something that we should we should have done better.
Matt Wolach:I love it. It's so hard, though. You're right, you get so focused on on certain projects and certain things you're doing. It's just difficult to stay on that. But I love that. You talk about the balance. I think that that's really critical. I think back to my startups, that's absolutely something that I wish we were better at as well. So wrapping up ozone, what advice would you have for other software founders who are in their early days trying to grow and want to make things happen?
Ozan:Yeah, I mean, look, the number one thing as I mentioned earlier would be make sure you are thinking about an area that you do have pretty deep experience and knowledge and it's not that it's impossible. Otherwise, it's just you're going to be very inefficient in the early days, where you're going and learning, usually on your own dollar if you've left your day job, right. And so, you know, I would say, that's number one thing. The other thing is just, you know, don't be afraid to reach out to your network, even people that I haven't talked to in years, if they reach out, and they say, Hey, you know, I'd love your thoughts on something. Or I'd love your feedback, or hey, you know, I noticed you were connected this person on LinkedIn, you know, how old? Do you know them? Would you mind making a warm introduction? You know, if you're going to be in the early days of building a business, you know, in many ways, there's not a lot of room for pride, you have to just kind of say, hey, look, like, I need help. And even, you know, recently, you know, I've, I've asked my board for help on certain things. Right. So I think, you know, I think it's really important to understand that, you know, at the end of the day as as highly performant, and as, you know, as much of a hustler, as you might be, you know, everyone needs help, I think, what was it, I think there was an old Arnold Schwarzenegger quote, something along those lines, right, it was like, you know, it basically takes takes a whole team of people were, you know, I think when he was in his early days of like, weightlifting and being competitive, I think there was something along the lines of like, they were pooling their money together to be able to do meals together, something like that. So, you know, I should probably understand that quote, a little bit better before bringing it up. But maybe that's a that's a fun little research assignment for everyone listening. But yeah, I think that's, that's probably the big thing is just, you know, it's gonna be really hard. And, and, you know, that kind of takes us to the other point, which is, you know, I would, I would highly recommend, make sure you have a good co founder that you trust. And, you know, there are going to be those hard days, those dark days where, you know, you feel down about it, and your co founder can bring you up, and vice versa. And also, just, you know, you want to make sure that you have someone that's that's in it with you, right, like, I have a phenomenal co founder Fati, he's amazing. And, you know, I, I scared, you know, I'm frightened. Think about on the bad days, you know, what kind of decisions you'd make if you didn't have that support system? So yeah, I would say, you know, make sure you're an expert in the area, I would say, make sure you're out there hustling and scaring your network and asking for favors. And then yeah, make sure I think that you have a good good one or two co founders that can, you know, help balance you out when you're, you know, when you're either depressed or not in a good mood, or whatever else, because, you know, it is a tough, long journey. And, and yet, like, like Elon said, right, it's just, you know, staring into the abyss and chewing glass. So
Matt Wolach:well said, It's so true. And I echo the co founder, you absolutely having great partners is critical. It's so cool how, how they can pick you up on those bad days, how they can help you through the tough times how you can work on it together and just create this amazing bond. So I completely agree with that. All's on this has been amazing. Really. So so awesome. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing all your wisdom with us? How can our audience learn more about you and edge Delta?
Ozan:Yeah, so go to our website, edgedelta.com that has a ton of information about our product about what makes us unique in the market. You know, I always get excited about all the kind of next generation things that we're doing. There's also like a concept of, you know, effectively a bridge to familiarity, where we also want to do some basics, we want to make sure that the users that come on board, they're looking for a great solution and observability for the locks mentioned in traces, we want to make sure also that it feels familiar to them, right? So it can't be all the way out in left field, it has to be, you know, hey, look, I totally understand how this is the same to the players like data dog. And I totally understand also how it's better in certain areas. So I would say, definitely, you know, Edge delta.com as well, as you know, obviously, I tried to post quite a bit on LinkedIn. So a lot of our new upcoming features and roadmap items that we're gonna be releasing, we try to be pretty pretty, you know, over communicative and thoughtful on LinkedIn as well. So feel free to reach out on LinkedIn, feel free to go to our website. We also have a wide open, free free signup and trial. So you can try the product you can use the product and you know if you do that, definitely I would love your feedback there as well. Okay,
Matt Wolach:awesome. We'll put all that into the show notes in the description. So if you're listening or watching go check that out. Like he said, go try it out. Because see if this products gonna help you. But Ozon thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.
Ozan:All right. Thanks, man.
Matt Wolach:Thanks for having me. You're welcome. And everybody out there. Thanks for being here. As I mentioned, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on any other amazing leaders like Ozan sharing their information, sharing their love and, and their expertise with you. So thank you for being here. Appreciate it, and we'll see you next time. Take care
