From Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman’s journey | Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder & CEO)

Abhinav: Thanks for having me here.

Brett: Let's start, I want to start by talking about what your childhood was like and when you got into programming and software engineering.

Abhinav: So I got my first computer, I think in maybe '97 when I was in fifth grade. My dad was a computer geek who actually trained as a civil engineer, but got his hands on a computer mainframe when they arrived in India, and he always wanted to buy a computer. So there's a long history of how we eventually got the computer. It was not as easy as just ordering online and having it be shipped, you had to wait a few months. But the computer did arrive and I got hooked onto it almost instantly. Compared to, I think, what access for things or tools or learning opportunities I had outside of this, this was way more fascinating. Of course though, I did start with getting hooked onto gaming first, the fast feedback loop that games give you was-

Brett: Do you remember the first game?

Abhinav: I think probably there was a game called Dave or Aladdin at that time that I played, I graduated to Doom soon after. So those are the few games I remember, but I played a lot, a lot of shareware games.

Brett: So what did your dad do, was he a civil engineer or he was just trained as a civil engineer.

Abhinav: He is a civil engineer, and he actually transitioned a lot of his work to working with computers. I think he mastered Microsoft Excel to such an extent that eventually he could just press a button and he would get all his work done and that was a hack for him. Everybody around his office was like, "How do you get this done?" We had people who would come to our house to check on calculators. At that time, they were so unsure of what the computer did. But he was like, "I can just get everything done faster in my line of work." And he eventually also taught me programming. We started with C, very, very old school, more bare metal basic stuff, pointers and functions and stuff. But soon after that, he was much more interested in the way computers helped his work versus the core programming aspects of it.

Brett: Was it odd at all to be in this rural part of India, and then you go and use a computer and you're tapped into the world in some way?

Abhinav: It's like, yeah, it was a teleportation device.

Brett: That's what it felt like?

Abhinav: Yeah, just get transported into places. In some ways, you're in this internet world at that time, there were forums and there were online websites and you're browsing all this and you're connecting with people in very different ways.

Brett: What's the way in which growing up in that way shaped the person you are today, the way you think about entrepreneurship, those type of things?

Abhinav: Within a couple of years, I think both my parents saw that I was spending too much time gaming and not using it in productive ways, and they basically said, "If you want to use a computer, you need to go do something useful with it," and I think that was probably the only constraint I had. So I really started exploring why these things exist. So I started thinking about how to build games themselves, and very soon, the intersection of the internet really changed my experience a lot, because while I started with games, I tried building desktop software. So back then, Visual Basic was the original no-code software, so I learned that and you could drag-drop forms and buttons and other things, and it was empowering that you could build things that you are using before, and that has been a big influence for me, really feeling behind the screen and seeing how these things are put together. So while I saw that with games and desktop software, I think the internet really unlocked, you could connect with so many more people, you could have so much more scale, you could do things that are just fascinating for people far, far away instantly. From Visual Basic, I graduated to, I think, building on PHP and MySQL. Purists might say it's not a graduation, you have become more of a script kiddie, but I disagree. But with PHP, a web server that was hosted somewhere in the US, you're just building software for the world, and I think that allowed so much freedom for the mind to explore that I think there was no going back. I think one thing that has stayed with me is that once you conceptualize something and you see it being used by people, then the timescale of that is short and so rewarding that you just can't work for anyone else. You get this extreme dopamine hit of some sort, which in some ways is actually helping the world be a better place. It's the best of both worlds. In the middle, from thinking about something to building it, there's a lot of pain. You fail a lot, and I failed so many times. I tried to build products and they would just not work. I picked up consulting on the site. So I had a friend of mine back then and we got together and we were offering website consulting services, the best-in-class, and we would just copy projects, whoever was a designer in Vogue at that time, the web designers, if they were using Flash and ActionScript, so we'd go build a Flash website. Half the times, we'd clone it and then come up with something useful and that would really keep going. So I think this mix, this cocktail of pursuing your own curiosity, your creativity, being able to actually be independent and make money, I think both of these things came together to give me the confidence that you could be on your own. When I graduated from college, I never went for a job. I was offered many jobs through my career, so to say, but I always went back to those memories where it was so empowering, so rewarding, to just go build to make someone else's life better.

Brett: What's the earliest dopamine hit that you can remember, meaning you conceived of something or had a client and saw them use that widget?

Abhinav: I think the first or maybe the second project I did, I got maybe an $80 check for that, and it was very hard to actually cash that check because there were no banks around to actually deposit it. So I think I'd made a website for my client, and along with that, I'd built a booking service. I forgot for what purpose, maybe it was some freight tracking or something. And he sent me this $80 check for a job well done. And I think my dad said, "Deposit the money in your account. When you grow up, you'll have it." I think I just framed the check. And I met that client later, like 15 years later, he pinged me.

Brett: Really?

Abhinav: He said, "Great job with Postman."

Brett: So what were your college years like?

Abhinav: I went to college from 2006 to 2010. For a year in between, I focused much more on competitive exams in India, that's how you get through. I landed in a pretty good college and I basically got back to this. There was a computer club, there were demands for a web designer, there was a demand for a web programmer, and I raised my hand and got quite good at it, but I still had this itch for building a product.

Brett: Instead of just doing consulting projects?

Abhinav: Yeah. So that was always paying the bills, so to speak, and that helped for paying for a MacBook or an iPhone. So I used to, like a nerd, you would buy the stuff, and my dad said, "I'm not going to pay for that stuff, you've got to earn it." So that was fun. But building a product is very different than building a project with a product, you have to conceptualize what people would need. And at that time, within our first year, what I saw as a pain point was a lot of people really did not know enough about going through the college prep process. Later, I felt like everybody feels the same pain when they go to college, but at least at that time, I knew that communities could connect online and get questions answered, and none of that was really there for aspirants or their parents, who were very involved in this activity. So we built a community called BITS360 for my college, and along with that, we built a panoramic virtual tour, similar to what we thought was Google Street View for college campuses, and we went around taking panoramic pictures, we stitched them together and we created an immersive experience, which became very viral in that community. We launched this in our first year in college, and in the second year, everybody who was applying for that college was going through that website. It became this unofficial guide to go in and we wanted to showcase the college in a good light. We then went to all its branches and that became, I'd say, the first successful but non-monetized product. That became our first startup later, which was called TeliportMe, and we had a mobile version of that. It came after trying a lot of things in the middle that did not work. So these two threads, which was trying to build these products, I did some consulting on the side, started designing websites for other clients, and I had a bunch of friends who were also eager, I found my community there, and some academics in the middle.

Brett: How did that develop your entrepreneurial taste?

Abhinav: A big part of this for me was really the importance of good design. Most things that I saw were just not built [inaudible 00:10:18] whether they were on the outside or they were on the inside, and when you build an integrated product and you know all the layers it involves, I knew I just didn't want to build a business, I wanted to build things that feel good, that look good, that work well, because you just can't stand it. Oftentimes, even if people would tell me that something looks great, I would still critique it and I would just never be happy. So people would say, "Great job, we loved hiring you," or, "We enjoyed the product," I knew there were so many things I could improve that I would always be a bit upset about it. So I think that was a big part of how I started thinking about entrepreneurship, whether it was building the product or building the company later on. It also gave me the resilience to actually keep progressing. I think a lot of people I saw who would just give up or would be so disappointed that they would not build the V2, the V3, but for me, doing this continuously, failing many times, but succeeding a few times, gave, I believe, me the resilience to just keep going. So I think that was a big mechanism for me. And I think finally knowing that I could always make money as a fallback just gave me the confidence. I don't need to go raise money, actually, I don't need to go back to my parents, I'll just go build some stuff and make money. So I felt, at that point, invincible. You just don't need to rely on anything, you just have to build good stuff.

Brett: Where did your taste come from? I think the thing that you noted about generally always dissatisfied, saw the product that you built could be better in all these ways, where did that come from, do you think?

Abhinav: From a very early stage, I started noticing what are the things I enjoy using and what are the things I dislike using, and a big part of me, actually, coming to Silicon Valley, I think I could trace it back to that. So if I go back to my childhood, I was in two camps, I'm building on open source or I'm using all the stuff that Microsoft did, and I could see the pros and cons of both of those, and they were still development tools. I think really, the sense for design I got from two places, one was really when I got the first iPhone or the first MacBook.

Brett: This was 2008 and '09?

Abhinav: Yeah. So around 2008, yeah, probably, I got my first MacBook.

Brett: Midway through college?

Abhinav: And I could see the difference between how something that is very extensible and flexible does not really feel very integrated and you have to really know the customer experience. And I read a lot about Apple, I read a lot about Steve Jobs, I went deep into it. I read a lot about data ramps, I read a lot about hardware engineering, industrial engineering. And this whole philosophy of less is more and subtraction is important, I think, made a big influence on me, where just everything that I saw being built in India or around me, even all the new products that came out were only about just adding more. I would react to it like, how can you make something better by removing? And I think Apple was the example for that, at least the most popular product back then. I think the other side of this was also because I was building websites, and then eventually I had to market our own products. I got a lot into creative design and trying to design those things too. So I built posters, I built websites, I built marketing material, and I became a big fan of seeing how good design is done. So a lot on the graphic design side. So I think I had these contrasting sides. On the creative side, one is your really neatly ordered integrated products that just work well, which are supposed to help users or consumers accomplish a task. And then, the other side of it is just create a freedom that graphic design offers in some formats, and I loved both of those things.

Brett: So connect the dots between this campus tour product that you built, I guess it was in the 2007 time, and the start of the first company.

Abhinav: The campus tool product did very, very well, and through that, I connected with another entrepreneur who wanted to build much more of a comprehensive platform. At that time, it was a Quora for students, so it was called Exam Crunch, and that was actually the first product we built. It never even took off. We were able to do two things. I built the entire front-end, I built the back-end, we connected it to the Facebook API. We actually won the third prize for the Facebook API competition, which was hosted as a brand new thing, so we were able to connect it to social feeds. And the whole idea was there are millions and millions of students in India, when you have a population of a billion, there are lots of people who are exploring this stuff and they're applying for things in all sorts of different places. So I was the CTO of this 2% company, and my co-founder's view was we're going to offer this as a platform.

Brett: And the product was a Q&Q product?

Abhinav: Correct, yeah.

Brett: Around student topics or around college, where I should go to college and that type of thing?

Abhinav: Both of those things. It was a mix of Stack Overflow and Quora, if you could put them together. So we had a ratings system and a category system, so that's what the product did. And I could trace it back to the first thing I had created because I was familiar with that problem. But that one did not work, there was no traction, and I don't know why, but it just bombed pretty much in the first week and I was disappointed. And then, we had to pivot and we were like, okay, what can we go to next? And we started doing these virtual tours, we started building them as a service. So we built it for a national University of Singapore, we built it for real estate companies, and we thought, okay, this is something that we want to have, they want to explore things visually. Virtual tours are a good place for that. You go into a website and all the technology was built on Flash. As an application, as a product, it had limited reach, you're just building a new product for whoever customer you have. So when Android and the mobile phone world took off, the idea pivoted to building this for smartphones. So we shrunk that technology for GPU processing. If you can imagine, we were working with CUDA back then. We tried out CUDA in 2011, it was just coming out. We bought a GPU, stuck it into a computer, and we were like, okay, how can we actually get this going?

Brett: And the idea was to put virtual tours on the phone?

Abhinav: Yeah. So you would click your pictures on the phone, but they would be stitched on the cloud, and the cloud was basically in our apartment, because that is where you could have GPUs. So that actually worked well, there was a lot of demand for new apps, and we built an Android app, we built an iOS app, and we eventually got featured on the Google Play Store.

Brett: And it allowed you to both create and consume them?

Abhinav: You could basically share it with fellow travelers, and we focused on that idea that if you're traveling, you want to capture an image of that, share it with fellow travelers, and you can teleport them to that location. That is why it was called TeliportMe. Not a good name, but it was not my call. And it worked pretty well, we had, I think, about six, seven million users.

Brett: When you started working on that company, did you have grand ambitions to build a huge company, or were you just tinkering around and having fun? What was the energy?

Abhinav: It was just have to build something that you can put your name on and be proud of it. I was the technical coder, I was the one in the back-end. I did not want to be front-facing. I really enjoyed putting this stuff together. So I was just in this building mode for a while, and as long as people said great things about it, I was happy.

Brett: When the first product was a total dud, did that impact you a lot? Were you sad about it or didn't really care and just onto the next thing?

Abhinav: Yeah, I was just enjoying coding. I was like, keep giving me stuff. We actually built many products, we don't have... It would fill up like five seasons of your show if I told you about all the failed products I built. We built a lot. But as long as I did not have to ask anyone for money, it was great.

Brett: So what ended up happening with that company?

Abhinav: So I left the company in 2013, and it was amicable, because in 2012, as I was building all these things and had this whole experience of building apps and websites through my... Ever since I got my hands on the computer, I realized in the middle that I was working with APIs all the time, I was working with external APIs, I was working with APIs at Yahoo, which I interned at for a while. The response for Postman was different than everything else I had seen. I was not even working on that on a regular basis, it was a side project.

Brett: Yeah. What was the story of the first line of code for it?

Abhinav: Yeah. I was struggling with trying to basically make a back-end for three different interfaces at the startup, and every time going back from your code editor to writing an API client and trying to figure out where stuff worked or did not work made me like, there should be a better solution out there. So initially, I searched for API clients that could have existed. I thought that people have been building this for the last four decades, I'm pretty sure not the first person to have experienced the pain. But everything really looked bad visually, and I was like, I'm not satisfied with what I'm seeing, so I just decided to build my own.

Brett: And what was the form factor of the product, and what made you want to let anybody in the world use it?

Abhinav: Yeah. So I wanted the fastest path to making it work, and at that time, the fastest path was having a Chrome extension. I did not want to build a big bulky app, I didn't have time for it. I wanted a runtime that was universally available, which is your browser. And Chrome had just introduced Chrome extensions, through which you could access APIs in the browser and actually have your own interface. So I picked that as the vehicle for that, and I could put all the skills I had, HTML, web design, to use there into building a dev tool, and I just built it and I put it out there on the Chrome Web Store and people started using it.

Brett: Without any marketing or telling people about it?

Abhinav: Yeah, no.

Brett: They were just searching for it?

Abhinav: Yeah, a lot of people were searching for it. My second feature request that came through GitHub, and the project was open source in the beginning, was actually somebody who was at Google and he was like, "I'm using this a lot, and can we add this thing or that thing?" And soon, I started seeing hints of this that, hey, this is not just someone like me who's using it, these are very experienced developers who are struggling with APIs or building with APIs all day long, and these are the ones who want more capabilities, and it just spread from there.

Brett: And it started, the product was focused on people consuming APIs?

Abhinav: Probably both. I think production and consumption of APIs, depending on what type of developer you are, is what matters. So if you're a back-end developer or a full-stack developer, you're doing both. If you're a front-end developer, by definition, you're only consuming APIs. We saw all of them.

Brett: Explain what that early version of the product allowed you to do.

Abhinav: So the first version of the product really allowed you to explore APIs, whether it is for debugging, testing, and then, eventually, it let you document an API. If you're familiar with something like Notion or Google Docs, it has an abstraction for just a literal doc there, but that's not good enough when you're dealing with technical abstractions like APIs. APIs have a very specific language, and if one character is off, it doesn't work anymore. So the product allowed you to really have APIs, API endpoints, as a first-class citizen inside the product. And what an API is basically how you connect your smartphone to your web server, so you have different applications talking to each other. So it's a pretty universal thing, and it is, in some ways, even invisible, to a certain extent, and that's what made it harder for people to use them. Most developers don't really know how deep certain things are. So the first version of the product really allowed and simplified a lot of those interactions for developers who were working with APIs, and over time, the complexity grew to basically use any API. So it could be configured to call your enterprise web service or it could be used to call your smartphone app's API, there were lots of different technical details in it. But the end outcome always was that if you want to get access to an API, you just do this within a few clicks. That's what the product let you do.

Brett: When you first built it, it was entirely focused on yourself, you didn't think about, oh, maybe other people want this, it was just solving your own problem?

Abhinav: Yeah, pretty much so. I think I was so deep into it that I didn't even think, I didn't even have to think. My loop was I would write code for the product I was building, then I would go to Postman and find out it doesn't work, so I'd have to go write up Postman and I would go fix that problem and then go back to my application again, and that's how it was for a while, until a point where the things that other people were using it for was not an experience I had. So if you were at Google, if you were at a healthcare company or you were at a Fortune 500, I had no idea what SOAP looked like, for example, or later, GraphQL looked like. So those things, I had to learn through user feedback a lot. And I was very maniacal, and still am very maniacal, about every piece of user feedback, so if a developer got stuck at any point, I basically went and fixed the product.

Brett: What was the feeling like when people started to reach out to you because you didn't launch it as a company, was it surprising?

Abhinav: It would be false to say that I wasn't pleased. It was something that was always I wanted and not having to push, but people coming and saying, "Hey, I love this thing." If people say, "I'm not using Postman," I actually would be depressed for the day. So every time people would come up and say, "Oh, I'm using Postman," it was amazing. And I also was nervously excited, like, what can I do and improve? So in initial days, I think that continued for a while. I was active in communities, like Stack Overflow or other forums, where I would talk about the product or I would just be helpful to people and I would slide in, "Hey, I'm building this thing if you want to use it," and the response was always positive. The biggest surprise for me was when Google reached out to feature Postman on the Chrome Web Store. They were building a version two of their web store, and Postman was one of the top 20 apps to be recommended, and that was a surprise. I was totally hallucinating at this point if I'm getting a call from somebody who's actually there. So after that, it felt a lot more real.

Brett: When did you decide that it could be a full-time thing and you were going to go actually leave the startup that you were at and go try to turn this into a company? And did it start, I'm going to turn this into a big company, or it was just, people seem to like this, let me go work on it full-time?

Abhinav: I had this intuition that I need to go see this all the way, because it was very exciting to see that there are so many people who are super smart and they're coming to this product. I've always knew that developers hold an extremely high bar for anything they use, and for me, actually, when people started saying that, "Outside of my core repository, outside of my ID, Postman is the one thing that I just cannot let go of," that was a big light bulb moment. And I started digging deep into, at that point, what do APIs mean for organizations, what do APIs mean for developers. And this was the day, by the way, I think Stripe was probably founded 2011, and to me, I think that was just the tip of the iceberg, so to say, what people thought of as APIs and how they actually are. I have been at Yahoo, I saw the internals of a big company at that point, and they had thousands of teams, hundreds of products, all had to talk through each other with services, and there was nothing really there. You were left on your own as a developer. I had that memory, then I saw that, okay, what is a product experience that people are relating to? And I had this intuition that this is going to be big as a company, and I think every year since then, I've always thought this could be a bigger company than what I thought it could be last year.

Brett: And so, what were the first few decisions or things that you did when you said, "I'm going to go work on this full-time"?

Abhinav: The first few things were I had to figure out how to make money without actually going and raising money. I think the idea of which YCs, Paul Graham alludes to, is be ramen profitable was very appealing. I read a lot of Paul Graham [inaudible 00:28:37] then, even though we didn't ever apply for YC. But I was like, okay, once you get to that state, you can start thinking a bit bigger, and I found a lot of ways to do that. Once I got to that point, finding the right co-founders, and I ended up working with Ankit, who I had worked with at Yahoo, and Abhijit, who I had worked with at my first startup. And knowing from my first experience, I knew that you have to have people outside of your skill set, people you can trust, absolutely, and they are in this for the right reasons, which is what you want to build as a product in the company, and not for anything else. And fortunately, I had Ankit, and then I found Abhijit.

Brett: Was the process like to get the two of them on board, and did you talk to lots of people? And you also had a product that was successful, so it was interesting, it's not like it's a blank sheet of paper, let's start a company, kind of a dynamic.

Abhinav: It was different, I think, how I was recruited to be a co-founder. I met Ankit a bunch of times, and because we are close, we had lived with each other in each other's apartments while hanging out, he was in Bombay, I was in Bangalore, so we spent a lot of time really discussing this topic. And Ankit had a much better job than mine, he had a high-paying job, he had a much better career, he went to Yahoo, he went to Adobe, and then he went and worked at another successful company, so I had to really figure out how to pull him out of it, and having the traction helped. But we also had to divide responsibilities around what does this mean, it's not just answering feature requests and really just keep coding., That's not how you build a company. And we thought of this idea of API collaboration being the core business problem to solve for. So while there are a lot of developer-specific problems, but a core business problem is how do teams and how do companies build APIs together and how do they make sure that they're in sync with each other and they're being built the right way. So that was the problem we started attacking, and once that idea became clear, we recruited Abhijit to first join us as an engineer. But he was so good and he was so company-first that we were like, we have to make him a co-founder. That's how we came together. And then, we were scouted out by our first VC and we formally started the company later.

Brett: How did you convince the two of them?

Abhinav: With Abhijit, it was easier. I think we had worked together, we called him, and one thing I knew about him was if he's sure about something, he'll just do it. So for both of us, plus, of course, it was Ankit and I, maybe he felt safer. With Abhijit it, was like, we called him, we said, "Do you want to be joining this thing? Do you want to be a co-founder?" He said, "Yes." So he just started, not a lot of work there.

Brett: That's great.

Abhinav: But with Ankit, he had to leave something and he had to take a big bet ,and we spent a lot of time actually working together, I think, building that trust. And I think eventually, he got very, very excited, very convinced. And it also helped that I think he got a little bit of that founder bug, having that freedom, being able to do something that you cannot do in a corporate environment, all of that was very freeing for him. But I think we also spent a lot of time really orienting ourselves towards who we want to be serving, what we want to be as a company, and I think that alignment helped early on, and I think we all got very excited about working with each other.

Brett: And so, what were the types of conversations that you would have in those very early days, the two or three of you?

Abhinav: I think a lot of that was focused in the early days on building, because we had something going. It's not like we are sitting here and being like, "Yeah, let's figure out what we're going to do next month." We have people really asking for stuff and we are finding out what is the fastest way to production for them, so that was just exhilarating. You don't have to think, you just have go build, so a lot of our work was centered on that. I think a big chunk of other work was really on roles and responsibilities and how do we want the company culture to be, and that started from our culture, how do we like to work? We like to trust each other, we have extreme curiosity, so a big chunk of our time was also talking about some of this stuff. And because I had had many experiences of working with other people, I had some sense to bring up some of those uncomfortable things early on. For example, who's going to be the CEO? In this case, I was very clear that this is a vision that I want to bring to life and I've been on the other side, to bring a vision to life, we need to decide that I'm the CEO. Correspondingly, that Ankit has to be the CTO in those phases to really take the product off the ground. And I think that conversation helped us each have clarity of responsibilities. I saw that a lot of founding teams don't do this, and then it becomes very crazy later. So I think having those uncomfortable conversations in the beginning, I was like, I'm going to be very scrappy, we need to be very scrappy. We're not going to raise a lot of money, we're not going to have a shiny office, we are hackers and we're going to build. So we rented an apartment in Bangalore, and Ankit and I lived together, we moved in.

Brett: It's funny how many founding stories start that way of just living together.

Abhinav: Yeah. He left his job, came over to Bangalore, we rented an apartment and we had three rooms. The first room was the office, and then I had one room and he had one room. We bought a dog together.

Brett: Why? You just wanted company?

Abhinav: We just wanted company. So it was a longer story, but we just thought it would be nice to have a dog around. Cooper, he's with us in the US, the dog is with us.

Brett: All these years later?

Abhinav: Yeah. There were things you could do that you can't do here, and we were scrappy and we were making some money on the side, so you just start having fun together.

Brett: So how did you get ramen profitable before you raised money?

Abhinav: Yeah. So I tried a lot of things, I tried donations, I tried, if you can believe it, some forms of advertising or sponsorship. I was getting paid $500 a month by three companies, one of them... Then because I had built an app, I was familiar with the in-app purchase model, and that was what I built, $10 lifetime in-app purchase, extremely bad pricing decision, and it just started selling. You just go to the product, hit a limit, and you start buying. And soon, I started making thousands of dollars a month.

Brett: And that's ultimately what became the path to monetization?

Abhinav: We made that free. We went to collaboration and a recurring SaaS model when we monetized eventually in late 2016, '17, so monetization happened for Postman way later. And the problem that we observed was people start coming to us with this issue of license management and sharing of these APIs with each other, and we thought it's an in-app purchase, so it's bought by user, but they were buying it in bulk. So there was something happening in the team dynamic that we needed to study. Actually, around that time, that was our key hypothesis, that to turn this into a recurring revenue machine, we need to really build a product for teams who are building applications powered by APIs, or consuming or building a lot of APIs together, and we found hundreds of companies willing to be part of that beta program. And we ran that beta program for about six months or so. I tested for that by putting the highest price point I could think of with the lowest possible amount of features, and I would say, how many will still sign up for this thing? And actually, that was the best pricing test we ever did, and within our first month, we had about 50, 60 customers just start right away. Stripe was a big part of it, we had to incorporate in the US, get Stripe billing in place. And there's a story we tell at our company, Abhijit, who was demoing our Stripe integration, we hold a weekly demo day, and he was like, "Yeah, so this is how this thing works." And the sale comes through, we were like, "Great, great job, Abhijit, we got our demo," but actually, it was a real customer. And everybody was like, "Holy shit, we're in business now." So it changed very dramatically for us once we got our first few customers.

Brett: You went from a Chrome extension, you had the founding team, you raised a little bit of money, where did you go from there?

Abhinav: The company formally started in late 2014, actually effectively early 2015, we officially incorporated in 2014. We had a million-dollar inbound seed round or so, which we rolled into a $7 million total round in a series A. We had about five, six people by the end of 2016. I might be wrong, might be 10 people or so. But my intent was to actually come to the US, because I just wanted to be next to our customers. So I was traveling, I was meeting customers, people who were excited, enthusiastic.

Brett: And this was still the Chrome extension product?

Abhinav: This was still a Chrome extension.

Brett: Wow.

Abhinav: You could go quite far. Eventually, we transitioned to the new Chrome [inaudible 00:38:07] platform, which was also deprecated. So both of these things are deprecated. I can talk a lot about API deprecations, how they hurt. Eventually, we built our own platform based on Electron and we distribute our own apps, we built a web version, all of that came later. But we never really allowed complexity until we really had to do something and it made a real impact on customers. So yeah, we just started making recurring revenue, which grew 200% first few years, then 100% for the subsequent years. And eventually, in 2017, I moved here and started really thinking about go-to-market from a broader lens after I moved here.

Brett: When you think about the early days of product building, was it mainly just pulled out of you by your customers, "We're trying to do this, we're trying to do that"? How did you decide what to build in what order in 2014 and 2015 and 2016?

Abhinav: There is a balance between customer feedback that you get, which is often reactive to a problem they're facing, and there's something just beyond the horizon that even they can't see and sometimes you can't see. So we would always start with a mix of these things and I would have a hypothesis that this is how the world is operating. So a key insight we built was that if you're building an API, it is going to be used by someone else, which is an obvious thing. But actually, most people did not think it was obvious, because there's so much in the code-centric world, because you're always writing your code, you're always building your binary. But we had this insight, looking at sharing graphs of the data inside Postman, that if you're building an API and it's supposed to be used, it's always used by someone else, because why would you otherwise build an API? And that became a key insight to drive a lot of the decisions around what we're going to build in the product next. So we built a collaborative workspaces product, we built public workspaces later, we build partner workspaces. And these problems are similar to, I would say, a Slack or a Figma, but very distinct, because we are treating with a much harder abstraction to understand. It's not documents or messages or design files, it's something that even sometimes developers don't understand or their business counterparts don't understand. So for a while, actually, we had to actually educate the customer on the fact what they're building and how that is important and what the next phase looks like. I spoke to a lot of CTOs in 2018, and oftentimes, when you'd ask them about microservices or service-oriented architecture, they would get it, but when you'd talk to them about APIs, they were like, "What are you talking about?" And that is like 2018 and APIs have been around for a while. In 2021, it changes quite dramatically. When I talked to people, they were like, "Yeah, we had API first." Of course, you're building APIs, but that education was done over the years by us and of course by some of the people in the industry. So having that balance of where the world will go and then orienting the product to both satisfy the community and the customers has always been this balance through the years. And now we have enterprise customers, so we have to balance some of the things that they want with what developers want. So developers want AI and MCP and other things, and enterprises want control and governance and all these other things. But even if we have both of these ends, I still have wanted to push the boundary a little bit, being a bit uncomfortable. Earlier this year, we launched an Asian platform as well, because we were like, okay, if APIs are going to be composed together, they can also be composed on Postman. And it's totally brand new, it's a muscle that we have to build. So always kept pushing a bit, and that oriented a lot of our roadmap.

Brett: Did you have a tension in 2015 and 2016 in terms of who we're actually building for? Is it a developer at a 10-person company? Is it a developer at Google? Is it a mid-market company? Is it not a developer? Was there any tension, or it was always intuitive who you were building for?

Abhinav: We had this inherent tension which started early on and I'd say continues to this day, that I think the question that you asked earlier, whether it's about people building APIs or consuming APIs was much deeper than what we thought. We saw that a lot of the early users of Postman, not a majority, but a significant fraction, were non-developers. These were product managers, technical writers, developer relations, solution engineers, customer-facing folks in go-to-market teams, who are some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the product, and they were like, "Postman has changed my life," and to this day, we see them, because to them, outside of Postman, there was nothing else, they were left out of this world. And of course, the core developer population has always been and continues to be our core base. The tension came from what is the level of simplicity we can have in the product without alienating developers. If you go full-steam into a developer product, you can remove all the UI and just have a terminal, and personally, that was something I did not like. I felt like a lot of the development job or the software engineering job is constructing systems together versus knowing the rules of the game. And a product decision that we took was that the product has to be useful for non-developers as well, so complexity is revealed through progressive disclosure versus something you have to read a manual or learn over the next five years on how to be good at Postman. We want you to be good at Postman in the first five minutes, and that was a very important decision that we had to really stress on.

Brett: And that was a decision made very early?

Abhinav: Very early, yeah. We were like, okay, if you are sharing an API with each other, anyone, it's a student, it's a hobbyist, they should be able to click a button and just use the API, and that helped a lot with growth later on. And we could have gone totally in that direction, where it is a Photoshop, where it is a... At one point, I built 3D models as well on 3ds Max so you could go there. So we did not want that complexity. So that balance, we had to navigate. And I think the later challenge came in designing for a developer who really does not have any restriction when it comes to when they're in a startup or they're building their own freelance project versus an enterprise developer who has to obey regulations, who has to conform to governance rules, and the balance between how much of preference you give to that freedom and how much control you give to the IT admin became a big point of friction.

Brett: What was go-to-market like in the early days? For years, was it just people finding it? When did you go from it's out in the world, people are sharing it with other people, people are taking it from one company to another, to we are going to put effort into go-to-market or distribution?

Abhinav: A big part of the challenge for us was always telling the story of what we are doing and why we are doing it, so I think first, I started with that challenge. Distribution was really not... It continues to grow even now, there are millions of users who come in without us paying anything on advertising even now, and I think that came from really just continuing to focus on the best-in-class product. So we first started with building community in San Francisco, not too far from here, we got into a co-working space and we held our first meetup, and I was super scared, like, who's going to show up? A company that started in India, nobody knows about it. And in the first meetup, we had like 50 people just show up, and it was like, okay, we have to go and do community here, and much more in the natural sense versus in the artificial sense of, okay, we are here to sell your products, we are here to sell you products. I had to build a deck, I had to talk about something, so I showed up and told people what we were building, and I was like, it's going to fall flat, nobody gets our messaging, nobody will get it. And then, one guy started with, "I have come to this meetup with these five things I want to ask you about why they're not in the product and how are you going to solve for it?" And I was terrified. I was like, I'm going to answer in front of 50 people, who I don't know before, first meetup ever. And what happened, which was very magical, was someone else answered in the audience that we have solved two or three of these things, we can talk after the meetup. So I started seeing these connections that people are forming and we were just facilitating, we don't always have to be part of the conversation or having to inject ourselves into it. If you have given the right building blocks to developers and they can figure it out, then they will teach each other. So a lot of that stuff happened at the meetup, and we continued that process after that.

Brett: What was hard about messaging the product or communicating what you were trying to do?

Abhinav: We were talking to multiple communities, these are your developers, these are your buyers, your investors and prospective employees, and when you're building a new thing, it is not clear which words to use. So we started with an API client, but it's much more than an API client, so what is it became a big part of the challenge. Is it an IDE for APIs? But if it's an IDE for APIs, then why are you not writing code in there? Is it a collaboration platform? If it's a collaboration platform, should I have docs and notes and things like that? And is it even a platform in that sense? I think during one year, we call it an API development environment. So those were common challenges we faced. Eventually, we settled on API collaboration platform as an overarching theme, with the desktop app being the client and the development environment, and as the platform expanded in time, we could actually call it a platform when there were multiple use cases of that. But in the initial stages, just calling it and articulating use cases was very hard.

Brett: What could you do with the product without paying, and then what was the dividing line to need a license?

Abhinav: So we put the dividing line as collaborating beyond three users as the time at which a team has actively decided to standardize on Postman. In the free product, you're just using it individually. So the single player product is free, the multiplayer product is paid, and it scales from there.

Brett: Was that an intuitive decision?

Abhinav: From our early experiments, we felt quite strongly about it and it was validated quite quickly. I think what we did not anticipate enough and has been proven out in subsequent years is that this is going to scale up through the entire organization, and it's not just a team product, it's actually a multi-team or a platform product. In most organizations, at the scale when they have more than 500 developers, they have a platform team who are building APIs for each other, there are multiple products, there are multiple business units, there are acquisitions, there are many things that happen in the technical architecture of a company for which we also have to design for. So the product was very flexible and very simple, which allowed for these patterns to emerge, but deliberate design for it was harder.

Brett: What else about the setup allowed the product to be used by so many different types of companies and scales of businesses?

Abhinav: I think knowing that being able to take in that feedback from developers from all these different places would allow for penetration in all these companies, just having that conviction and just keep going at it. We just never stopped, and we still continue to this day. We have launched MCP support over the last couple of months, I think we want to do A2A as well. But just knowing that those early signs, whether it's GraphQL or gRPC, having people in the company who understand technology to such an extent and being able to build for the developer, and knowing that eventually these things translate into the enterprise, how that usage translates into enterprise gave us a lot of conviction. Beyond that, we also expanded a lot on the platform side. We added tools for documentation, automation, API monitoring, we have tools for service observability, we added tools for governance. There were lots of these fragmented tools that companies were cobbling up together, and now Postman is a single solution for all of them. And then, when customers started coming up and saying that, "Okay, I'm trying to use this other tool, I'm paying you as a platform, why can't you just do it?" It became a very simple answer. So we now marry the developer side of it, which is shared adoption, and knowing that we can't miss the boat on that. But also, talking to customers and knowing that, okay, this is where we have a gap, being able to pull it together just allows for the best of both worlds.

Brett: How did you think about whether you wanted it to be an open source company or not? Because it started as an open source product.

Abhinav: I was excited about it, but what I learned was that for something that has a commitment to end user experience, you cannot do it with open source. Open source is great for really vetting the right technical constructs, and parts of the product are open source, like our runtime is open source, where you can say, okay, the throughput of thing X is 20 milliseconds or 40 milliseconds, but where a button should be is my opinion, so we can't waste time on that. And soon, we found out that really people are not interested in contributing to it, and if they were contributing to it, we just have to say no. So if we had open source, you would have a product with 30 buttons, 70 toggles with 500 configuration options, and that just becomes a product not worth using. So we went to a different model, we went to the more free cloud-hosted model, with taking the components that could be open source, we kept them open source, and developers actually reacted well to it.

Brett: How do you think the company is different because it was started in India?

Abhinav: I think the climate in the Valley and Bangalore actually changed quite dramatically over the last 10 years. I would have said, if we were talking about this in 2014, that, oh yeah, Indian companies are scrappy, raise less money. Indian companies raise a lot of money, there is money now faster sometimes, and some of them have global ambition. I think the big thing for me was that I wanted to build a category-leading global product, wherever we were from, so I think that ambition was baked in. That was less common at that point. I think there are more startups now, but not to the scale at which I think you have ambition in the Valley, and that was very appealing to me. Money can be both an accelerant and sometimes it can harm as well, and I think when you raise a lot of money, which companies can do in both places, but I saw that in India, there's a lot of short-term thinking that sometimes can come in, pay packages ballooned, average salaries probably have grown 5x, 6x, and that's the state of the market. But I think in building companies for the long-term and really treating stock as a core currency was something that was new and I think it's probably changing. So for us, really embracing the ethos by being in the Valley, by being here, hiring the best people that we can have here and really getting the best talent from the companies that are better than us really changed our culture a lot. I think the parts that I do love is we... Amazon is a good example there to borrow from. You have to embrace constraints from wherever you are. We did not let constraints ever get in our way to making progress. You can always make progress, you don't need too much to make an impact on developers and you can keep going. So during the times when I think everyone was raising, I'd say, a lot of money, we were still quite prudent about how much we actually need and whether this is a bet or this is just we are splurging, and I think that ethos came from being a little bit in India, and that has allowed us to invest in AI and other things now.

Brett: What caused you to decide to start to raise much larger amounts of capital in the last five years? Was there some specific pivot point in your thinking?

Abhinav: When it became clear that this is going to be what I believe is a multi-billion dollar business with just our first product, it was like, okay, how much is available, what's the timing here? I heard Stewart Butterfield from Slack say it at a conference, that if the money is available on good terms, you just take it, and the money was available and on good terms, so I took it and it allowed us to invest. But also, we had to say no at times when we didn't want to take it because it would've been a bit too much. So I think that was the reasoning behind it, it allowed us to invest in more products, get higher quality talent, and those are the reasons. And eventually, I see how does it serve customers, and I think we've kept that going.

Brett: What do you make of the fact that before you started this company, you worked on a bunch of different products that you were trying to turn into a great company and none of them worked in this way, and then you created this thing yourself and you accidentally created... Have you thought about what there is to be learned by that, from that dynamic, if anything?

Abhinav: So what I think I learned from that was you really have to have both of these states of belief and disbelief at the same time, which is this big paradox always in your head. I have extreme belief in this one thing that is going to be working very, very well, but I also have this conscience or judgment about really the true value of that thing. Sometimes you build a product and you just become very excited, like, oh my God, I have worked so hard, I have raised so much money, I have done so much, blood, sweat, tears, and it just doesn't matter, market doesn't care anymore. Oftentimes, I would get too transfixed by that. And in this thing, what I felt was, yeah, this is a thing that really the market wants. And I think that is a very hard thing to keep in mind at all times and take the right calls through it. And I felt like every time I failed, I'd go back at it, I was like, yes, the hypothesis was correct, but I also just went a bit too far in believing we could do it. Like, yeah, a social street view for the world captured through phones is a great idea. At this point, we were talking about the metaverse a while ago, and I was joking we were 13 years too early in the metaverse, and the idea is going to come back. Apple's trying out augmented reality as well. But you just can't build it if the customers are not ready. And I think what happens is that when you're building a product, you get so sucked into wanting it to be successful that you just lose that judgment.So I felt like that is something to take away. And things even that when they worked moderately, I knew they worked moderately, and at some point they're done, something is just done and you move on. I think with a bigger company, with a successful company, you have to find a space which just always keeps on growing. And I felt like with Postman, with software development, it's an always growing space, software is never done, there are new techniques, there is new technology, and we just happen to be in this place and we have to continue earning that place over time.

Brett: When you think about a star employee that decided they want to start up their own company and they come to you and want your perspective or advice, how does this translate to the type of stuff that you impart on other people that are thinking about starting a company?

Abhinav: So we have had people in the company who've been here like eight, nine, 10 years, and if anyone who is really a star employee, make sure they don't leave.

Brett: You tell them what a bad idea it is, you're going to have a miserable life.

Abhinav: I say, "Are you sure?" That probably says a lot. But we make sure that they see the value of the stock that they're going to accrue in Postman.

Brett: Let's say a non-employee comes to you.

Abhinav: Yeah. I think I try to dig into the reasons of why they're doing it, and is it really, do they just want to build a company and have their freedom? If you think that's the way, then yeah, it's free. But it's not, you're accountable to your employees, your investors, your customers, and it's not a part-time job, it's a full-time job, so you have to do it every day. So I encourage them to think that way. My serious piece of advice is always make sure, you're doing this for the next 10 years, you have the right co-founders and you hire the right team. And my partly half-serious advice is to always never spare money for the lawyer or the accountant, don't skimp on that, skimp on the office if you need to.

Brett: It's amazing what cheap lawyering will do to your company.

Abhinav: Yes. You find out-

Brett: Lawyer debt is more expensive than tech debt.

Abhinav: Correct. So many people we've hired, like, yeah, what is the problem with that company? Oh, we signed contracts we shouldn't have signed.

Brett: You talked a lot about the underpinnings of the company's successes, building something great for developers, building a great developer experience, which is often ignored, what does that actually mean?

Abhinav: There's this idea of being in a state of flow when you're engaged in deep work, and unfortunately, most of the software that we have created over the last 20 years is anything but that. We have collaborative software that I would say it actually distracts you positively. I have notifications off on my phone, but everything is trying to notify you about something else that is more important than the thing you're doing. Email, that is always telling you someone else is more important than the thing you're doing. And I could get started about consumer software for another two hours. So what building software for developers is to me, how do they engage in the state of flow and deep work, which is really in line with what they're trying to accomplish, and that means you have to eliminate friction from tiny areas that you would not even see unless you're doing the task. You have to bring in the right context at the right time. If you show them a piece of data, it has to be the right piece of data. So this balance of really adding things that are keeping them in the state of flow, but removing things that are non-essential, is what I mean by that. And keeping a developer in the state of flow is critical, and that's why designing for Postman is very hard, especially when we're building for collaboration, because we can't jam 10 notifications in that, people hate it, they start yelling. We put a screen in saying that, "Hey, do you want to read a tutorial?" We get hate mail on our support channel, because it distracts people from deep work that they're doing. So that's how I saw it.

Brett: And that's how you've always thought about it in terms of the design paradigm of the product?

Abhinav: Yeah. I would say I myself could do a better job of sticking to it, it's very hard. It's always appealing to say that, "Hey, this cohort of users could help with a little bit more nudging or things," and sometimes I've given in into that, but I always have to remove it.

Brett: So I wanted to wrap up where we always do with the question, who's been the most influential person in your life or in building the company that's not a family member, and what is it that they have imparted on you?

Abhinav: I think Charlie Munger said, "You should make friends with eminent dead." So I like that phrase a lot, I read a lot. On this side of the eminent dead, I would say I think Daniel Kahneman was a big influence on this. I read this book called Mindstorms by Seymour Papert, I think, which is a lot about the development of a child's brain when they're learning the logo language and how they explore worlds. So I think both of them I would cite as influences, things that I go back to and check my own thinking against. With respect to people who influenced me while I was building the company, I think at each stage, I had a bunch of advisors who were either CEOs or previous operators and I kept them close, and at different stages there have been different people that I would go to and say, "I find myself in a situation and I should seek your advice." I think one of our board members, Ram Gupta, he's an independent board member, we started in 2015, I think was a big influence and just having a voice.

Brett: Are there specific conversations that come to mind or things they imparted on you?

Abhinav: At many times, there is a 51/49 divide, where I'm not sure whether we go this way or that way, and I think having someone who has the courage to just tell you the truth was useful. At some point, I got the advice I should just focus much more on hiring, and I was like, that's great advice, you can't really shoulder the burden of building a company on your own and somebody needs to go tell you that. So whenever we're debugging a problem, we need people who can have that independent voice and tell you how it is, so he was one of those folks.

Brett: Good place to end. Thank you so much for doing this with us.

Abhinav: Thanks for having me, yeah, it was a deep conversation.