Introducing Multiplayer

An interview with cofounders Steph and Tom Johnson.

 Somak recently sat down with Steph and Tom Johnson, the cofounders of Multiplayer, to discuss the origins of their company. Multiplayer, a collaboration tool aimed at backend developers, officially launched its beta this past month. Steph and Tom dug into the human side of developing — the aches, pains, and stressors that accompany the marathon of building distributed software — as well as the cultural factors that go into making remote collaboration viable. They also touched on mentorship, startup inspirations, and overlooked forms of bias in the hiring process.

Listen to the full interview here, or read the abridged transcript below.

Somak Chattopadhyay (SC): Why don't we start with learning a bit about the entrepreneurial journey, how you initially started Multiplayer, but also the unique perspectives you bring as cofounders, and how you initially connected before starting this company?

Steph Johnson (SJ): So in terms of how we connected, that was about 25 years ago. We are married cofounders, so that is something that is of interest to a lot of people that we speak with. Particularly the VCs we chatted with, they liked that. They felt that it de-risked the startup scenario a bit. They said that they stressed out a little bit more when they were writing checks for people who’d had a good year at a company together, and that was their history. So the fact that we had our communication down was appealing to a lot of them.

I traditionally have been in go-to-market roles at developer tools, open source projects, and public companies. And Thomas is a thirty-year backend developer. I was thinking about leaving my last gig to start something — I didn't know what yet — and Thomas said, What about one of my crazy ideas? And I said, Alright, pitch me. And he claimed that all of the nerds in his universe thought it was amazing. And I said, That's great, but I need to battle test it with my own crew. And every developer we talked to said, Wow, what a great idea, huge need. You should do it. So we then decided to go ahead and start the company together.

Tom Johnson (TJ): So my side is, I've been a software developer for thirty years. So we have complimentary skills. That's very important. I do the tech side, she does go-to-market. I don't want to do her job, she doesn't want to do mine, so it's a nice fit. And my journey to Multiplayer is feeling the pain of the customers that we're targeting. Building distributed software is very hard. It's getting more complex. I first started thinking about Multiplayer ten years ago, and as an entrepreneur you have to figure out when is the right time to bring a product to market. It wasn't the right time, because it was very early, but now it's the right time because this is an every-software-development-team-problem, and here we are building it and hopefully changing the way that software development teams work on this type of software.

SC: It's great that you both have such nice complimentary backgrounds. I know Steph, you worked at DigitalOcean and MongoDB, and you obviously have a lot of experience in infrastructure tech. Can you touch upon how some of those prior roles influenced the culture you have today?

SJ: Absolutely. I think DigitalOcean was my first foray into the world of in-house. I had been on the agency and consulting side before that. Mitch Weiner, one of the cofounders, was my boss at the time. He was the CMO. He's now an investor in Multiplayer and he actually came up with the name. We had started out being called Protocolr, but Mitch was the one that said, You need a swing for the fences name. We can market the heck out of this. You're Multiplayer! And it wasn't just frivolous, because it's one of the main attributes of the product, that you can all work concurrently and have multiplayer access. And there's a gamer element to it as well, so we really, really dig it.

He's been a huge influence and always was at DigitalOcean. Such a positive person, such a creative marketer. I've taken a lot of what I learned from him and tried to bring that into our current opportunity. I also think David Acharya at MongoDB was incredibly focused. He used to talk about different kinds of CEOs, how some are quarterbacks and others are head of sales, and I think he described himself as the person who would navigate the ship through the rough seas and be a really good captain. I hope I'm quoting him correctly, but he really stayed focused. And if you look at MongoDB’s success, the stock price, where they are right now… I got there in 2017, spent four years and our growth was incredible. So learning from him in terms of discipline and focus and how to build a company was also very helpful to me.

TJ: To build on that from my side, as the CTO managing a development team: In my career, I've worked on a number of teams, worked for a number of bosses, some good and some bad, as I'm sure we all have. I would say the best experiences that I've had are managers that have kept the team busy and focused. Focused on the right thing, knowing when to say no to stuff, frequently. So you're just focused on a small number of important things, with some transparency too about What are the needs of the business, What is the mission, What is it we're trying to do here. So you're doing more than just coding. You're thinking about the customer and why we're doing this.

SC: So let's talk about the pain point you're solving in Multiplayer. I know you've said that you ran this idea by several developers. Can you dive a little deeper in terms of what specifically made you choose to build a collaboration platform targeting backend developers?

TJ: Most of the interesting software that's developed today is distributed software. It’s software that is running in the cloud and pulling together SaaS dependencies. MongoDB and Atlas over here, Auth0 and Octa over there… You're really tying together software that's not running on one machine. It's not just desktop software anymore. To design that, develop it, manage it: all of that is really difficult. And every company that has software has this problem now. And when you think about working together with companies, you're really doing it a lot of times through an API.

So it's software talking to software. With dependencies you have the possibility for breaking things, unknowingly sometimes. There are just a lot of complexities with working on distributed software. That's it. They're pain points that I've felt to be my career focus. So I thought there should be a tool that allows you to understand your platform, because people miss that picture. What is your software? To answer that, you need to walk up to a whiteboard and start drawing boxes and dependencies. But suppose you don't have the whiteboard anymore. Now you need a tool which pulls it all together from the top down: system architecture, dependencies, down to the APIs. Pull together some modern features that you see in Figma and other tools. You'll have a better developer experience. And developer experience is all about getting software developed and out to market faster.

SC: Steph, do you want to add your own context as well?

SJ: For most of my four years at MongoDB, I reported to the CEO in a Head of Comms role, where you get a front row seat for anything that goes down: the good, the bad, the ugly. I learned a lot having a front row seat to developer and engineering teams at D.O. and MongoDB. About what makes developers’ lives easier, what they hate, what is the best way to work. I also saw the inter-dynamics between marketing and engineers, and sales and engineers, and how all of those things work.

I'd always been really impressed by CEOs like Edith Harbaugh from LaunchDarkly — who is also one of our investors — who really set out to put a product out there that would improve the human condition for the developer. So it wasn't just, I'm going to enhance your productivity, or I'm going to make something happen faster. It was, Think about when you push a feature, you start to sweat, you get sick to your stomach, you're panicked. You might have your phone on that whole night because you're waiting for someone to report a bug.

It's stressful, and it's ugly, and it's traumatic, and she wanted to actually help developers feel better, work better, and relieve some of their stress. So I felt like this was the type of product that would help them with collaboration, help them get around things that they don't like to do, and have a higher level of happiness when they're coding. I liked that there was a human element to it and it wasn't just a workhorse productivity tool.

SC: When entrepreneurs are trying to figure out product market fit, you can always find people who will say, Oh, that's a great idea. But it's quite another thing to get people to say, I'm willing to risk my political capital, I'm going to have my boss take on this as a new vendor. How did you and how do you continue to actually figure out what to prioritize? What are the must-haves versus the nice-to-haves?

TJ: So I've lived the experience. I'm sort of the Initial Customer Profile (ICP), because I've lived the problem. That helps a lot, right? But that doesn't guarantee product market fit. It involves more talking, more researching, getting something early in front of people, and listening, doing a lot of listening. So we did a lot of that. We talked to a large number of CTOs and developers that helped to give us confidence that what we were trying to do would ultimately find product market fit.

So we're at the beginning stages, where we've got a path forward to more that we want to develop. But you can't just stay in your room and think, I think I know the problem that I'm solving. You actually have to go out and talk to a lot of people. And as a developer, that can be tough to do, as we prefer to just code and solve problems. So it's been great to have Steph alongside me, where we can together reach out to a wide network and have lots of conversations and show designs and even stuff that's not quite developed yet.

Show ideas early and often. I would really recommend that approach to other entrepreneurs. Really just try to get something out there. Get something out there in front of people to have conversations because it will change. I could show you sketches I made ten years ago when I was first starting to think about Multiplayer. There are a lot of elements that have survived. Some have not.

SC: Maybe just going back to the question I had about just managing teams, how do you all not only attract your talent, but how do you make sure that they stay engaged and excited with the culture?

TJ: I think it starts with defining the culture and having a mission that people really want to be a part of. People don't want to just work and have a job. They want to feel a sense of purpose. If you can provide a working environment that gives them a mission, a sense of purpose, and a positive culture, that comes from the top down. You have to define this stuff. If you can do that, it's not easy for employees to leave that behind. If you're happy and you have the sense of mission, it's not easy to go around the corner and find the exact same thing.

SJ: I think, too, it's important when you have people across different time zones to make sure that nobody feels like they're the inconvenient one. And it's something we had to think about so much when we had All Hands at certain times. You can't have an All Hands at a global company at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday on a regular basis. You're going to have to think about your global workforce. And I think we're very deliberate already. We have a twelve hour gap with a couple of our employees, and we're extremely deliberate about making sure that they can work at the times that are convenient for them and their family and whatever else is going on in their life.

We're not dictating things so that just because the founders are in Eastern Standard Time, everybody has to figure out how to work overnight or accommodate us. Being built that way from the beginning, I think, is really appealing because a lot of companies will say you're remote, but then you'll sign on and find out you're working third shift because you need to overlap their hours.

SC: How do you look at user experience when you're developing a product like this? When you think about other collaboration tools, like Figma, which obviously completely transformed how people do frontend design, how do these past examples of successful collaboration tools inform your own strategy as it relates to user experience?

TJ: You know, I would say that you have to start with making sure that you're solving a real problem, right? And if that problem has a collaborative aspect to it, then bringing features to make it easy to work together in a single tool is essential. So you don't have to have meetings and you don't have to be in the same location. Figma, just as an example, they solved the problem of it being hard to have a design and share it and collaborate and iterate on it. So let's put it online, let's make it something that you can work on together. And they brought in the real-time collaborative elements for that purpose, but also to eliminate a lot of the meetings that you need to have to discuss new designs.

What we've done is try to start with the problem, which is that it's hard to work on distributed software. And the collaborative features are required in order to solve that problem, because communication is such a big part of developing software. It has to be solved as a package together.

SC: Can you talk a bit about your own personal backgrounds before you entered the corporate world or joined startups? Did your parents or other people that you met earlier in your lives influence your aspirations to be an entrepreneur? If you were to look in a crystal ball back when you were younger, do you think you'd ever have seen yourself running your own company?

SJ: I feel like I'm a late bloomer in that category. I got my degree at the University of Florida in the journalism school, and my father was a Presbyterian minister. I was reading the scripture one Sunday, and the president of McCormick Spice Company, who was a parishioner, heard me, went up to my dad, and said, Your daughter is an incredible orator, I would like to get her a job in New York City at a PR firm.

And my dad was like, Okay, and I graduated and I came to New York City and got a job in a PR firm. And that's how I started my career on the Communications side. And I loved it. I don't want to make myself sound like a cog in the wheel, but I was very happy being part of an entity, being an important part of that entity, but never really running the show or leading the charge.

I don't think it was until I went in-house at DigitalOcean and MongoDB that I started to look around and realize the volume of things that you have a seat at the table for when you're in a Comms or a go-to-market role.I don't want to say there’s nothing you can't do, but there are few surprises left for me, having done this at a public company and seen every possible permutation of agita, happiness, success, and problems that could occur. So I think it clicked in me at MongoDB that I could do this for myself, but I wouldn't say as a kid that I thought, I'm gonna grow up and run a company.

SC: Well, I think you're being modest when you talk about these great oratorial skills. That's something that I find so fascinating too, when you look at who's successful in the technology world, storytelling and being able to communicate your value prop in a simple way to various constituencies is an amazing superpower. To end with a question outside of technology, if you weren't doing what you're doing today in Multiplayer, what are other passions and pursuits you have?

SJ: Yeah, I mean the very frivolous one is I've been kind of obsessed with these immunity and longevity podcasters and doctors lately, like Peter Attia. I'm a little depressed that I'm supposed to now be doing only Zone Two at this age because that really bores me and I don't want to spend two hours pedaling slowly. I want to get on the Peloton and kill it. But I have a hobby where I come up with mostly disgusting baked goods on weekends that hit my macros. I experiment with the protein powders and the fibers and the low sugar and all these things. And Thomas and Olive, our daughter, have to test. Every weekend, I come up with a new cookie and it always tastes disgusting.

He'll ask me, Is it good? And I'll say, you know, Do you want to live to 150? Then yes, it is. So that's my frivolous one. On a serious note, I am really committed to making sure that when people think about diversity in the workforce, they are also thinking about neurodiversity and diverse attributes that you cannot see with the naked eye. I believe that companies really need to commit to making sure they get different people on board. If you want to be completely baseline corporate about it, you will have a better product and a more successful company if you have a more diverse team. Period. So even if you're not doing it simply because it's the right thing to do, it's also a business benefit and more CEOs need to be dedicated to pursuing that.

Only five percent of CTOs are women. That's very disappointing, that's got to change. And I also think, as someone with Tourette's, that it is very easy to say, I'm going to hire X amount of women, because in many cases you can see that that's who you're hiring, but there are many people with issues and disabilities and different ways of thinking and superpowers that you would get through a conversation with and not know that they're diverse. So how do we create a category for those people that can't walk into an interview and then you can tick the box of what you think they might be?