How to Make Developer Onboarding Simple

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Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.3s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with verisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did You Know? Podcast. Today I'm excited to have Rasmus, who is the co founder of Silo team. They make on and off boarding developers super simple, and we're going to ask Rasmus all about how they're able to do that. But welcome to the show, Rasmus.

Thank you so much. Nice to be here.

Yeah, a lot of exciting questions. Obviously, developers are so important to the tech industry, but also just companies in general as they develop. But obviously, on and off boarding developers are not simple. And so excited that you guys have built what you've done. But why don't you tell the audience a little bit about your background and kind of the founding? Orange. Yeah, 100%. So Silo Team is actually founded by me and my sister IDA. So we come from very different backgrounds. So EDA, she comes from the commercial side, whilst me coming from the product technical side. So the background story of me is that I've been part of several startups and larger companies throughout my career so far and worked with very talented people, especially engineers. And there was a consistent theme that whenever we brought on new talent, there was this long road to getting started. So I was living in this almost dead space or a Silo, where they was really eager to kind of start contributing code but didn't have all the documentation that they need to actually understand 1.3s

what we tried to build. So that was the kind of idea of where Cider Team started

to take shape. But then a few years later, I was really confronted with this when I was part of scaling a large engineering team and it was just a real mess. So as you do, you reach out to your sister and say, okay, what can I do different here? Because there must be something wrong with how I am tackling this. And she suggested go out and talk to other tech teams and see what they do, see if you can get some learnings from there. So that is what I did and eventually ended up speaking to over 300 tech teams and my sister, she eventually joined and we started mapping out the problem around 1.2s especially technical onboarding. But as the recent economic downturn has kind of showed us is that

onboarding is one thing, offboarding is also important and with all the kind of sensitive things that you as an engineer have access to. So exploring that as well, which ultimately led to us funding a company called Silo Team. And you, Victor, you've seen the demo of the platform. Hopefully you like it. And 2.1s we have actually signed a few POCs lately and are preparing to launch and also about to raise our first

precede. 1.4s Yeah, no, first of all, I love the name. I think to me, branding is a big thing. Maybe it's the marketer in me, but I think 1.3s the brand name is great. So for those so many questions of what you just mentioned right. And you're solving a huge problem. So maybe one of the first question is 1s for the audience that may not be aware of onboarding, because people understand onboarding any employee in any department is not easy. Right. It's kind of like when you first go into a company. Either they don't have enough time to onboard or it takes too long to onboard them for them to start actually producing, right? Whether that's in sales or marketing or development. But for those people that are not familiar with kind of onboarding developers, how long does it usually take without a platform like yours, how long would it usually take for a developer to truly get up to speed and being productive? Is it a few days, is it a few weeks? Or what's the typical time frame?

So it all depends on the complexity of the role. But when it comes to 2s a junior or mid level dev, you tend to say that it takes at least three months to get started. So in the first month, you're 25% up and running, and then it just goes up from there. But the problem is when you have more senior roles and they take much longer than that and 1.6s they leave, then you've invested all these resources, not just in the recruitment part, but they are such a vital piece of the product. Squat or team or whatever you call it, that the. Other players also gets affected. So it's a huge problem, especially for tech teams. And these problems can be if we are more concrete, it can be everything from introducing the code base debugging or even the server architecture. And these are things that are spread out all over. There's different stakeholders and you tend to just do an Excel sheet. And that Excel sheet from a stakeholder point of view doesn't really tell you, okay, this stakeholder has done this, now it's time for the next stakeholder to continue with the onboarding. So what happens is you end up with these long slack threads, endless slack threads or email threads where important stakeholders that should focus on product just spend the same amount of time or a lot amount of time on onboarding people that could be automated. So what we are trying to do here is build a system that automates and streamlines the process. So if you onboard one full stack developer and you have certain things that you need to do that you can replicate that journey for the next person coming along. So doing this at scale is the hard thing. And that is something that both me and it and the Silo team team really have experienced ourselves and think that we have something that will really add value to that. 1.6s

Yeah, our podcast and conversation is always about bringing insights for the audience that may not be familiar or know about these things. And so everything you just said, I think is so critical. So another question as a follow up for you is, when I think about even let's say you're onboarding marketing, for example, you may have files of different files in different folders, and you just go in there and you kind of get a feel of the type of content and branding, and then you kind of get going. So obviously, on a development like everything you just mentioned, right, you talked about the excel spreadsheets and inefficiencies. So can you kind of go over why is it so maybe the top two or three areas? Why is it so difficult for engineering managers to create that process without your platform? And how does your platform ultimately solve that? 1.3s Can you kind of give us some insights there? 1s Yeah, for sure. 1.3s To kind of give you the pitch. So we're solving this. We're building a tool that brings kind of all the complexity of technical onboarding into one space. So that can be everything from introducing the DevTools code base, server architecture, debugging, but it also streamlines the stakeholder responsibilities so that everyone knows what they, what they should do. So it, it almost serves as a smart assistant and, and always offers insight and recommendations on what kind of worked and what did not work and what can be improved. So that's in a nutshell what Silo team does. But to be more specific, to answer your question, when it comes to 1.1s all the documentation around a developer and everything they need to, need to know in order to do their work, that tends to be very disorganized. It's all over the place. And the difference when you are onboarding a marketing person or someone with a more traditional occupation that's not too technical, is that it's not so much that is spread out and you kind of already have an understanding of what your role

includes, what should be expected of you. It's more how can I adjust myself to the company specific needs? But as a developer, if you go in and you're supposed to build this large fintech company and you have all the different security things, you need to understand all the different places where the code lives and who is responsible for that, and that it can be quite a mess. And what we think is that is a direct link between retention and the onboarding. So if the onboarding is not done in a good way, that kind of sets the tone of the tenure and after a while then you leave. And that can be extremely costly 1.1s for the company. I think it was a recent study where they named, if a junior developer with $98,000 annual salary leaves within a year, it could cost the company up to 300K just to find a trainer replacement. That kind of gives you an indication that this is a huge problem and especially at scale. 3.4s

Yeah. So you talked a lot about on the employer side, which is hiring managers and how that can help them streamline things and all the stats you just mentioned. I think it's so useful in today's economy. Right. But what about on the employee side? As a developer being hired, whether junior or senior, you're going through this process and if the company itself doesn't offer a great training process or onboarding process, you're also not able to get into the work right away. I'm sure you've been a developer right yourself, getting hired at companies starting as a new start. What was that feeling like of you're not able to do the best you can or get started immediately? Is that pretty common as well?

So I think 3.3s if you have your shit in order, only then can you start helping other people. And I think it comes down to the responsible stakeholders. Unless they are confident in their role and have an understanding of this is good, this is not good, then only then can the experience for the new starter actually be positive. 1.4s The experience for the new starter 1.1s is pretty much having a plan in place and we help them tailor that plan. So as an example, 2s if you're onboarding an AI developer, we have generated these industry best practice templates that you as an employer can start from, which really creates foster static experience for the new starter. So the new starter will have an overview of this is my plan to get introduced to the company within the environment that could be slack or teams or even email 2s and you feel like, yes, this is something that's going to work. And at the end of the day, if that wouldn't be the case, 1.2s our solution wouldn't survive.

But. It. Yeah. So obviously we talked quite a bit just now about kind of the onboarding process, but you also talk about the value of offboarding. Can you kind of explain the challenges companies face today with offboarding and then how you guys help solve that?

Yeah, so unfortunately, as everyone knows, you know, the the recent war in, in Europe and the economic downturn is affecting 1.1s everyone, so, so tech teams aren't sheltered like they used to be. Now they are definitely being affected. And a lot of our POC customers have really emphasized the fact that they need a tool that can not just streamline the onboarding process, but also the offboarding. Since there's so much security 2.3s that has been exposed during an onboarding, during an offboarding, I mean, that they want that to be smooth. So from Silo team's point of view, it's actually a fairly natural transition from onboarding since we're doing the introduction and we're creating all of these events, but we're just reversing it to the other side and spinning it up a little bit and making sure that the offboarding from a security standpoint is. 1.1s Is good, but also 1s having a good leave and making sure that new developer actually gets off boarded in a respectful way and a respectful manner. So we can move away from having these mass zoom calls where one day you're part of a team and then the other you don't even have access to your computer anymore. So as harsh as that reality is, you can still make the offboarding kinder. So for example, since before you start a company you don't have access to Slack and all those kind of communication tools, you would be onboarded on your personal email. So what we want to do is we also want to make sure that the offboarding goes back to that personal email interaction where you as a company 1.8s can provide you with everything you need in your next adventure. And that could be everything from reference checkups, making sure that you send the computer to the right place. It could be connecting you to a group 2s which has been affected by the redundancies. And make sure to foster that kind of culture that you want the reputation to stay in place, even though you sometimes have to do redundancies. So I think that's an opportunity 1.3s if you do that in the right way. Me personally, I've been part of a large company that just overnight disappeared and that was dreadful 1.2s and detrimental to the reputation of the employer. Whilst if the employer would have just made sure that the fundamentals are there, it can be done in a respectful way. 2.3s

So yeah, no, I love that. Obviously, I think it's a partnership, right, between employer and employee. 1.9s I totally agree with you. You guys are creating an amazing solution to facilitate both sides. So usually when companies, especially in this economy and time, when they buy a solution, they're concerned about how long it takes to implement and learn and set up. So with your solution, what do you typically see as the set up? If a company is interested, how long does it take for them on average to get set up?

So what we have done is we make sure that the onboarding of our new clients, it's very simple, we want that to be done in just a few minutes and instead spread out the more complicated processes of connecting to the different dev tools and whatnot to the different stakeholders and their individual responsibilities. So you as an admin would set everything up, the environment, and then invite the different stakeholders that are responsible for each step and then them themselves would set up the specifics of their responsibilities. So what that enables us to do then is to get started much quicker. And you don't need to have this two months onboarding process. You can literally just get started and invite everyone and constantly improve kind of the onboarding journey, if that's what you're focusing or on offboarding. So we are going to live on several marketplaces. Those are yet to be named, but 2.8s it's certainly a collaboration which we think will streamline 1.1s the way you as a customer can kind of import all your people data and all the sensitive information that you would need. So you don't have that large barrier of entry. We want to make it as simple as possible. 2.3s

Yeah. So what about obviously you have startups to enterprises and obviously as startups you have a few developers, maybe you're hiring a few at a time and then larger enterprises are hiring more people. So would you say your solution, what's the best fit as far as company size? Is it a company that is hiring consistently on a weekly monthly basis? Is that even for startups that are maybe not hiring as often still wants to track right these onboarding and offboarding of developers? So what's kind of your view and thoughts on who should consider your product?

So the problems are consistent no matter the size? Yes, but we tend to focus on teams with developers of 25 and more because that's really where the problems start to take shape. So medium to large companies are our core focus, but that doesn't mean that we neglect the smaller startups of the world, especially scale ups, because if they already start planning ahead for a big hiring or redundancy, then it's certainly important to have the tools in place. And so we let you kind of start tailoring that environment as a small company. But we really have had an enormous positive feedback from medium to enterprise. 1.2s

Yeah. 3.3s As we close to wrapping up here, this has been super helpful. I think anybody 1.5s just like sales teams need CRMs and you need these tools to help you manage, get visibility and streamline things to make things more efficient and productive. 1.3s I think you guys are doing exactly that for DevOps, which is which is amazing. One of the last questions for you is obviously, every company is looking for the return on investment for whatever they're investing. They're really investing in this solution, in you, in this product. If you have to give us maybe two or three kind of the top ROI you think customers would be getting by using your product, what would you say those top ROI things would be? From cost savings to time savings and what would you say?

Yeah, so I think the first thing would be that you get new developers that you spend so much money on hiring, start producing code faster. That's the main ROI that we're looking at. Secondly would be that stakeholders, they don't waste time more than they need to. They have a tool in place to structure everything they need so that they can focus on other important things at hand. So that would be the second one and third one having a tool that also fosters culture interaction. So one thing that we are focusing on now, and I know this is not particularly ROI, but actually it is, because developers have one of the highest turnover rates of all occupations. And we strongly believe that if you make sure that developers doesn't live in Silos and have connections to other departments and really foster that culture, then they'll stick around longer. And we think there's a disconnect today between tech teams and the wider organization. And we really want to be that bridge between the non technical and technical people. 4.6s

Yeah, no, go ahead.

No, please.

Yeah, no, I just love how well thought out you guys are building this product and solution and really understanding your market. I totally agree with you. I think developers, 1.1s a lot of times, people look at them as techies, and they're doing things people don't understand. It's code. And then for developers, it's also a very 1.4s they kind of get assigned a task, and they work on it, and then they oftentimes may not see 1.7s be able to interact or have opportunities to work with other teams. So I love the concept of this culture. And so it's like you guys thought of the front end, the middle, the culture, the maintenance, and then also offboarding as well. It's just very well thought out, and that's why we're so excited to partner with you guys. 1.1s One last question that we always ask our guests is, you've seen a lot, you've done a lot. You're building this amazing company. If you have to give one personal and or business advice to the audience that you're really passionate about, 1.2s what would it be? And I would say, obviously, a lot of founders have learned a lot through this founding journey. Right. So any one advice that you would want to share? 1.5s

Well. So 1s if we speak to all the founders out there who are trying to raise money, we're in the midst of a financing round and 1.2s we really understood the importance of building something people really want, not just something nice. Have 1.7s these days, with everything that's going on, the software that's going to survive is the software that truly brings value to people and companies. 1.3s If you're able to communicate that and actually do that in real life, then you're going to ride out this storm on top. Otherwise you'll be dead in the water. And unfortunately, it's going to be a tough time ahead. So we are going through this change. So it's important to really set that narrative. 1.5s

Yeah, no, I love that insight. Make something people maybe even need, not just want. And I think the interesting thing is every founder feels like that's their kind of baby and passion and sometimes it's hard to decipher 1.2s that. But I love that advice. One thing I thought of, that I love to kind of just get your quick thoughts on is obviously AI 1.2s really went viral the last couple of months with Chat GPT and everything. 1.4s Being kind of a technologist yourself, right? What is your view on this whole AI? 1.3s Is that something in the plans as well in the future for you guys? And what do you just think about the whole AI space right now? Especially just the pace of innovation, right. Things that we thought would come years, it would take another year to innovate. It's happening in weeks, happening in months, right. The pace of innovation is just incredible. What's kind of your thought on that? 1.6s

So I think with every new technology, 1.7s there comes a lot of question marks. And when something as groundbreaking as what OpenAI is working on kind of gets introduced to everyone, 1.4s there is this hype that can be a little bit 1.6s too much, 1.2s I think think that it will slowly start to calm a little bit and people are going to realize the benefits it can bring, not just all the risks. So me personally, I'm super excited about this. Take Silo team as an example. We're building this personas based on each occupation, role, dev role. And for us to use 1.4s OpenAI and actually give recommendations based on the input is something I'm so excited about. And I can't wait to kind of explore that further as we get more access to all the things that OpenAI is building. But 1.4s I do think 1.3s it's fun to be part of it. 1.1s I think Bill Gates was the one who mentioned that there were two things that he had experienced that was really, truly groundbreaking. The first one would be 2.3s moving your mouse graphically on a screen. Second one would be what's happening now. And for us to talk about this to our children is probably going to be part of their everyday life. But for us to see this and see how it changes every industry, it's astonishing.

Yeah, 1.7s I'm super excited about all the possibilities as well. And I think innovation, competition drives innovation. I guess you see what Microsoft is doing. So Google is trying to catch up and then everybody's trying to catch up, but then everybody's kind of pushing each other to innovate and go quick, right? And so it's like they all brought their secret weapons out of the dungeon in the basement. And yeah, it's pretty exciting. But no, we're super excited to partner with you. You guys are truly building something that people need. And yeah, I really appreciate you being on the show.

Anytime. Enjoy your day.

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How to Make Developer Onboarding Simple

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