David Young sold his company for $170 million to Samsung, demonstrating his entrepreneurial journey from founding and scaling startups to achieving.
David Young sold his company for $170 million to Samsung, demonstrating his entrepreneurial journey from founding and scaling startups to achieving a successful exit.
We were at the right place at the right time. It worked out really well for us. We ended up having just some tremendous early customers like Twitter and Tumblr and the Facebook developer program. Lots and lots of different sort of growing growing customers that were looking to sort of innovate on top of a data center as a service platform. And we ended up selling that company to Samsung. And if you use a Samsung phone or a mobile device today, you're probably hitting a joint back end. Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have a really awesome founder, a founder that has done it multiple times. You know, we're going to be really navigating and diving into, you know, the whole thing about the building, the scaling, you know, financing and exiting, you know, in this case, he's done a couple of exits. And now he's on his latest journey, you know, which has
to do with the open source and all of that good stuff. So again, without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, David Young. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Alejandro. It's great to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Originally born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Give us a walk through memory lane, David. How was life growing up for you? Um I love Texas. Um I was born there. Um I'm a Cowboys fan, so, you know, full Texan. I was recently there with my wife. And we went to the shitty apartment building where I used to live when I was a baby. And my mom used to tell me all these crazy stories. So I'm I'm glad I got out of there alive. But Texas is a great place. I mean, there's so many great entrepreneurs and it's just sort of a culture because it's the West, right? And it's where people go, they go out from the very beginning of of the history of the state to sort of find
opportunities. So that's that's really sort of the culture I grew up in as a Texan. Now, in your case, you know, like you went to you went to school and out of all things, ancient Greek, you know, it's kind of like completely different from any of the stuff that you did or that you're doing nowadays. Yeah, so that's right. When I when I went to university, I I went to Indiana University and my field of major was not computer science. It wasn't a pre-major or something like this. It was ancient Greek. It was classics. And I really stand by that decision. I I feel that today one of the things that's missing in our sort of technological culture is a lack of understanding of what went on before us and the sort of depth of understanding and knowledge that people had in the ancient world. And one of the best ways to come in contact with this knowledge is through learning the language. And so,
I did a very intensive study of Greek and Latin. Did a a bunch of study on a Greek poet called Pindar. And I think that's really stood me well. I mean, you can always go and become an engineer, learn the sort of principles of software engineering, pick those up pretty easily. It takes a lot of hard work. There's no question. But having that classics background has really helped me as a writer, as a thinker, as someone that sort of is interested in new ideas and the opportunities that these new ideas bring. So, for you, you know, you ended up going to Wall Street, which again, you know, didn't really serve the entrepreneurial drive that you have and that you've been really pushing on. But after that, you know, you ended up being getting going, you know, with Techstars, which was the segue for you to becoming an entrepreneur. I mean, that's quite a a shift and a change of gears, going from
Wall Street to all of a sudden entering the tech world and and and and working for some of those more risky, you know, type of endeavors. So, how was that shift like for you? Well, you're right. I went to Wall Street, you know, coming out of a classics background. I had been accepted into a PhD program and I was thinking of going to this PhD program at a really good school, but the head of the program said, you know, you may want to look around and see what else is available because we don't make a lot of money as professors in ancient Greek. So, I was recruited to this bank and at the bank, Wall Street at the time, they invested a lot of money in tech startups. Believe it or not, Wall Street saw technology as a game-changer, as a differentiator for each bank. And in fact, Goldman Sachs at the time was investing a lot of money in a a little company called NeXT Computer and they used NeXT
Computer and NeXTSTEP and the different tools that were on NeXT and NeXTSTEP to sort of differentiate their trading practices. And so, there was a real culture within Wall Street of sort of figuring out how to use technology to differentiate your business. And I was part of that sort of culture, but ultimately, you're you're right. I mean, when you're in a big company, you have to do play a lot of politics. And so, I had some ideas. I had a couple friends on the West Coast that were working on some startups. And so, I left I ultimately left the bank, left Wall Street and went out to the Bay Area to work on my first startup. And the first startup, you know, was quite a quite an outcome, Joyent. So, what were the sequence of events that needed to happen for you guys to bring Joyent to life? Well, actually, the first startup was a failure. It wasn't Joyent. Joyent was the next one. The
first one was a little company called um ManageStar, and we were a SaaS company that was trying to help construction and other sort of task task manager. It was early days, learned a lot of stuff. We grew to, you know, about 100 people. I was the CTO there. And as I said, you learn a lot of things. We had a great founding team, but we just weren't able to sort of make it work. And um I remember sitting in um a hotel room up in Seattle having seen a big customer of ours and sort of thinking, you know, this may be coming to an end. It would be great to start to work on another project that I had in mind. But at the time it was really, really difficult to sort of get all the infrastructure you needed for your startup. You had to go rack and stack a bunch of servers in a data center. You had to buy a really expensive database, maybe from Sybase or Oracle or one of these things, get a
database administrator, all this stuff. And I began to think, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could sort of figure out a way to use some of the emerging open source tools and and sort of stitch those together so someone could go to a website and buy a data center sort of on a subscription basis. Now, we think of this as cloud now, but we sort of called it data center on demand. And um you know, I and a couple of the founding engineers put this together. We started, and you know, we found real success. It's It's also true in those early days as we went out to companies and said, "Hey, we've got this new idea where you can go to a website." Nothing existed. There was no Amazon. There was no Google Cloud. There was nowhere you could go where you said, "You can go to this website and you can spin up this data center and most people told us at the time that we were crazy. They would never ever
they liked sort of holding on to their server, holding on to their, you know, their infrastructure. They would never ever use our service. Um but we were very lucky because at Joyent we sort of got in with what was at the time called the Web 2.0 crowd. This was where olds the old sort of way of doing SAS and and original sort of web one was being transformed by a lot of entrepreneurs who were looking for ways to move fast, really sort of create these user-generated content-based services um and move fast, sort of try things out. If it worked, it worked well. If it didn't, it didn't. And sort of data centers as a service, what became known as cloud or infrastructure as a service, we were at the right place at the right time. And as you said, it worked out really well for us. We ended up having just some tremendous early customers like Twitter and Tumblr and the Facebook developer program,
lots and lots of different sort of growing growing customers that were looking to sort of innovate on top of a data center as a service platform. And we ended up selling that company to Samsung. And if you use a Samsung phone or a mobile device today, you're probably hitting a Joyent back end. That's amazing. Talk about impact. Now, for you, obviously, Joyent was your first rodeo more on the CEO role. So, I think that going from the technical side like you were in your first rodeo that, you know, as they say, you either succeed or you learn. So, in that first rodeo that you were alluding to, you learned, you know, what, you know, worked and what didn't to apply it to Joyent which ended up having a nice outcome. Now, on your first rodeo where you were more on the CTO side, more technical, on the second one with Joyent more at the CEO helm, more on the business side of things. How was
that…