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

Abhinav Asthana 0:00 I'm gonna be very scrappy. We're not gonna raise a lot of money.

Brett Berson 0:02 Okay.

Abhinav Asthana 0:02 We're not gonna have a shiny office. We are hackers, and we're gonna build.

Brett Berson 0:05 For today's episode, I'm excited to sit down with Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman, an API platform used by more than 40 million developers.

Abhinav Asthana 0:14 We want you to be good at Postman in the first five minutes.

Brett Berson 0:16 Before Postman, Abhinav built a virtual campus tour for his college in India that later morphed into his first startup called TeleportMe.

Abhinav Asthana 0:25 It worked pretty well. We had, I think, about six, seven million users.

Brett Berson 0:28 In our conversation, Abhinav shares how he originally built Postman as a Chrome extension to manage external APIs for his side projects.

Abhinav Asthana 0:36 If people say, "I'm not using Postman," I'd be depressed for the day.

Brett Berson 0:39 He then digs into what made him decide to pursue the idea full-time.

Abhinav Asthana 0:43 You know, if the money is available on good terms, you just take it.

Brett Berson 0:45 How he chose his co-founders, and why community was central to Postman's go-to-market strategy with developers.

Abhinav Asthana 0:52 One guy started with like, "I have come to this meetup with these five things about why they are not in the product and how you're gonna solve for it." Someone e- else answered in the audience that we have solved two or three of these things.

Brett Berson 1:02 Let's dive in. [on-hold music] Thanks for joining.

Abhinav Asthana 1:08 Thanks for having me here.

Brett Berson 1:09 Let's start. I wanna start by talking about what your childhood was like and when you kind of, kind of got into programming and software engineering.

Abhinav Asthana 1:18 So I got my first computer at, you know, I think in maybe '97, uh, when I was in, like fifth grade. My dad was a computer geek who actually trained as a civil engineer, but got his hands on a computer, you know, mainframe when they arrived in India, and he always wanted to buy a computer. So there's a long history of, like how we eventually got the computer. It was not as easy as just, you know, ordering online and, and having it be shipped. You had to wait a few months. But the computer did, uh, arrive, and I kind of got hooked onto it, like almost instantly. Compared to like, 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. You know, like the fast feedback loop that games give you was-

Brett Berson 2:13 Do you remember the first game?

Abhinav Asthana 2:15 I think, uh, it was probably... You know, there was a, there was a game called Dave or Aladdin, you know, [chuckles] at that time that I played. I graduated to Doom soon after. So, so those are the few games I remember. But I played a lot, like a lot of shareware games.

Brett Berson 2:34 So what did your dad do? Was he a civil engineer, or he was just trained as a civil engineer?

Abhinav Asthana 2:37 He is a civil engineer, and he actually transitioned a lot of his work to, uh, working with, with computers. Like, he was like kind of... I think he mastered Microsoft Excel to such an extent that eventually you could just press a button, and he would get all his work done, and, and that was a hack for him. You know, like everybody around his office was like, "How do you get this done?" You know, they were like-- Like we had people who would come to our house to check on calculators. It was at that time, you know, they were like so unsure of what the computer did. But, but he was like, "You know, I can just get everything done faster in my line of work." And he eventually also taught me programming. You know, we started with C, very, very old school or, or like 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 kind of the core programming aspects of

Abhinav Asthana 3:39 it.

Brett Berson 3:39 Was it odd at all to sort of be in this rural part of India, and then you go and use a computer, and you're kind of tapped into the world in some way?

Abhinav Asthana 3:47 It's like, yeah, it was a teleportation device.

Brett Berson 3:50 That's what it felt like?

Abhinav Asthana 3:51 Yeah. For, for... Like you just get transported into places which had kind of, in some ways, you're kind of in this internet world, right? At that time, like there were forums, and there were like online websites, and you're browsing all this, and you're connecting with people in, in very different ways.

Brett Berson 4:07 What's sort of the, the way in which growing up in that way shaped the person you are today, the way you think about entrepreneurship, sort of those type of things?

Abhinav Asthana 4:16 You know, within a couple of years, I think my, my dad saw, I think both my parents saw that I was spending too much time gaming and not using it in productive ways. And, and they basically said, "You know what to do [chuckles] . If you wanna use a computer, you know, you need to go do something useful with it." And I think that was probably like the only constraint I had, you know? So I, I really started exploring why these things exist. So I started thinking about how to build games themselves. And, uh, very soon, the intersection of the internet really changed my experience a lot because, you know, while I started with games, I tried building desktop software. So back then, you know, Visual Basic was the original no-code software. So, so I learned that, and I was like, you could drag, drop like forms and buttons and other things. And it was empowering that you could build things that you were using before, and that, that has been a big influence for me. Really like peeling behind the, the screen and seeing how these things are put together. So while I saw that with like games and desktop software, I think the internet really unlocked, like 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. And, you know, 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. You know, 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, 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 and the-- then the timescale of that is short and so rewarding that you just can't work for anyone else. You just, you know, you get this extreme dopamine hit of some sort, which in some ways is actually helping, you know, the world be a better place. It's kind of the best of both worlds. In the middle from thinking about something to building it, there's a lot of pain. Like, you fail a lot, and I failed, like, so many times. Like, I tried to build products, and they would just not work. I picked up consulting on the side. So, you know, my-- I had, I had a friend of mine back then, and we got together, and we were offering website consulting services, you know, the best in class. And, and we would just, you know, copy projects. Whoever was a designer in vogue, you know, at that time, the web designers, like if they were using Flash and ActionScript. So we'd go build like a Flash website, and half the times we'd clone it and then come with something, like, useful, and that would really keep us, like, going. So I think this mix, this cocktail of like, you know, 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, you could be on your own. I-- When I graduated from college, I never went for a job. I was offered many jobs through, I guess, my career, so to say. But I always went back to those memories where it was so empowering, so rewarding to just go build, you know, to make someone else's life better.

Brett Berson 7:36 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 Asthana 7:44 I think the first or maybe the second project I did, I got a maybe like an $80 check for that, and it was very hard to actually cash that check because there were no banks [chuckles] around to actually deposit it. So I think I'd made a website for my client, and along with that, I'd built a, a booking service. I forgot for what, what purpose. Maybe it was some like freight tracking or something. Uh, and, and he sent me, you know, this, this $80, uh, check, uh, for a job well done. And I think my dad said, "I have deposited the money in your account. When you, when you grow up, you'll have it." I think he just framed, framed the check. And you know, I met that client later. Like 15 years later, he pinged me.

Brett Berson 8:28 Really?

Abhinav Asthana 8:28 "It's a great job with Postman." [chuckles]

Brett Berson 8:30 So what, what were your college years like?

Abhinav Asthana 8:33 I went to college, uh, from 2006 to 2010. For a year in between, I focused much more on competitive examination, uh, you know, exams in India. That's how you kind of get through. I landed in a, in a pretty good college, and I basically [chuckles] got back to this. You know, there was a computer club. Uh, there were, there was, there were demands for a web designer. There was a demand, uh, for a web programmer. And I raised my hand and, and, uh, got quite good at it. But I still had this itch for building a product.

Brett Berson 9:06 Instead of just doing consulting projects.

Abhinav Asthana 9:08 Yeah. So that was always like paying the bills, so to speak. And that helped for, you know, paying for, for a MacBook or an iPhone. So I used to, you know, like, like a nerd, you would buy the stuff. And my dad said, "I'm not gonna, you know, pay for that stuff. You've gotta earn it." So, so that was fun. But building a product is very different than, you know, building a project. With a product, you have to conceptualize what people would need. And at that time, um, 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.

Abhinav Asthana 9:58 So we built a community called BITS360 for my college. And along with that, we built a panoramic virtual tour, uh, 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. So within the second year, we launched this in our first year in college, and in, in the second year, everybody who was applying for that college was going through that website. It became kind of like this unofficial guide to go in, and we wanted to showcase the college in, in, in a good light. We then went to all its branches, and that kind of became, I'd say, the first successful but non-monetized product. That became our first, uh, startup later, uh, which was called Teleport Me, and we had this... We had a mobile version of that. It came after trying a lot of things in the middle that did not work. So I had 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 Berson 11:11 How did that sort of develop your entrepreneurial

Brett Berson 11:14 taste?

Abhinav Asthana 11:15 A big part of this for me was really the importance of good design. Most things that I saw were just not built well, 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, you know? And, uh, 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. You know, we, we loved, uh, hiring you," or, you know, "We enjoyed the product." I knew there were so many, like, things I could improve that I would always be a bit upset about it. [chuckles] 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. Uh, it also gave me the resilience to actually keep progressing. Uh, you, you always feel-- I think a lot of people I saw who would just either give up or would be so disappointed that they would not build a 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, uh, mechanism for me. And I think finally knowing that, you know, I could always make money as a fallback just gave me the confidence. Like, I don't need to go raise money, actually. You know, I don't need to go back to my parents. You know, just go build some stuff and make money. So I could-- I kind of felt at, at that point invincible, you know? [chuckles] You, you just don't need to rely on anything. You just have to build good stuff.

Brett Berson 13:05 Where did your, um, taste come from? Like, I think the thing that you noted about, you know, 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 Asthana 13:18 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 kind of back to that. So if I go back to my childhood, I was, you know, I was in two camps, you know. I'm, I'm building on open source, or I'm using all the stuff that Microsoft did. And I could see kind of the pros and cons of, of both of those, and they were still like development tools. I think really the, the sense for design I got, I thought from two places. One was really when I got the first iPhone or the first MacBook.

Brett Berson 13:59 This is two, uh, two thousand and eight and nine?

Abhinav Asthana 14:01 Yeah. So around two thousand and eight, yeah, I probably got my first MacBook.

Brett Berson 14:05 Midway through college.

Abhinav Asthana 14:06 And I could see the dis- difference between how something that is very extensible and flexible does not really feel like very integrated, and you have to really know the customer experience. And, and I read a lot about Apple. I read a l- lot about Steve Jobs. Uh, I, I went deep into it. I, I read a lot about Dieter Rams. I read a lot about, uh, hardware engineering, industrial engineering, and this whole philosophy of like 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, or even all the new products that would came out were only about just adding more. And that was like I, I would react to it. Like, how can you make something better by removing? And, uh, I think Apple was, was like the example for that, and at least the most popular product kind of back then. I think the other side of this was also because I was building websites, and then eventually I had to market, you know, 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 both-- I think I had like these contrasting sides, uh, on, 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 creative freedom that graphic design offers in some formats. And I loved like both of those things.

Brett Berson 15:39 So connect the dots between this campus tour product that you've built, I guess it was in the two thousand and seven time, and the start of the first company.

Abhinav Asthana 15:49 The campus tour product did very, very well, and, uh, through that I connected with, uh, another entrepreneur who wanted to build a much more of a comprehensive platform. At that time, it was a Quora for students. So, uh, it was called ExamCrunch. And, uh, that was actually the first product we, we built. It never even took off. Like we did-- 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 like as a brand-new thing. So we were able to connect it to social feeds. And the whole idea was, you know, it is gonna, uh, like there are millions and millions of students in, in India. Like, you know, when you have a population of a billion, there are lots of people who are exploring this stuff, and they are applying for things, all sorts of, you know, in, in all sorts of different places. So I was the CTO of this, uh, you know, two-person company, and, uh, my co-founder's view was, you know, we're gonna offer this as a platform.

Brett Berson 16:58 And the product was a Q&A product?

Abhinav Asthana 17:00 Correct. Yeah.

Brett Berson 17:01 Around student topics or around college, like where I should go to college and that type of thing?

Abhinav Asthana 17:05 Both of those things. It was kind of a mix of Stack Overflow and Quora, if you could put them together. So we had like a rating 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. Like 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 do next?" And we started doing these virtual tours. We started building them like as a service. So we built it for the National University of Singapore. We built it for real estate companies. And we thought, "Okay, this is something that people want to have. They want to explore things visually." Virtual tours are a good place for that. Like you go into a website, and all the technology was built on Flash. And, uh, as a, as an application, as a, as a product, it had limited reach. You're just building a new product for wh- whoever customer you have. So when Android and the, uh, 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, [chuckles] you know, a computer, and we were like, "Okay, how can we actually get this going?"

Brett Berson 18:35 And it was a virtual-- The idea was to put virtual tours on the phone?

Abhinav Asthana 18:39 Yeah. So you would click your pictures on the phone, but they would be stitched on the cloud, and the cloud was basically i-in our, our apartment 'cause 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, uh, we eventually got featured on the Google Play Store.

Brett Berson 18:58 And it allows you to both create and consume them?

Abhinav Asthana 19:01 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 [chuckles] Teleport Me.

Brett Berson 19:16 Uh-huh.

Abhinav Asthana 19:16 Not a good name, but, uh, you know, it was not my call, and [chuckles] it did work pretty well. We had, I think, about six, seven million users.

Brett Berson 19:25 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 and like what was the energy?

Abhinav Asthana 19:35 It was just have to build something that you can put your name on and be proud of, proud of it. I was the technical coder. I was the one in the, you know, uh, 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 Berson 19:56 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 Asthana 20:02 Yeah, I was, I was just enjoying coding. You know, I was, I was like, "Keep, keep giving me stuff." We actually built many products. We don't have... Like, it would fill up, like, five, uh, seasons of, of your show if I told [chuckles] you about all the failed products I built. We built a lot, but as long as, you know, I, you know, I did not have to ask anyone for money, it was, it was great.

Brett Berson 20:23 So what ended up happening with the company?

Abhinav Asthana 20:25 So I left the company in 2013, and it was amicable because in 2012, as I was building all these things and had this, you know, whole experience of building apps and, uh, websites through my... You know, ever since I got my hand on a computer, I realized in the middle there that I was working with APIs all the time. Uh, I was working with external APIs. I was working with APIs at Yahoo, which, uh, I interned at for

Abhinav Asthana 20:53 a while. The response for Postman was different than everything else I had seen. Like, I was not even working on that, like, on a regular basis. I would-- It was a side project.

Brett Berson 21:04 Yeah. What was the story of the first line of code for it?

Abhinav Asthana 21:06 Yeah. I was, uh, struggling with trying to basically make a back end for three different, uh, interfaces at, at the startup. And, um, 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, like, four decades. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to have experienced the pain. But, uh, 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 Berson 21:45 And what was the form factor of the product, and what made you wanna let anybody in the world use it?

Abhinav Asthana 21:51 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, and I put it out there on the Chrome Web Store, and people started using it.

Brett Berson 22:33 Without any marketing or telling people about it?

Abhinav Asthana 22:36 Yeah. No.

Brett Berson 22:36 They were just searching for it?

Abhinav Asthana 22:37 Yeah, people are... a lot of people are searching for it. Uh, my second feature request that came through GitHub, and, and the project was open source in the beginning, was actually, you know, 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, you know, 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, and it spread from there.

Brett Berson 23:08 And it started the product was focused on people consuming APIs?

Abhinav Asthana 23:12 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 are doing both. If you're a front end developer, by definition, you're only consuming APIs. We saw all of them.

Brett Berson 23:29 Explain what the, that early version of the product allowed you to do.

Abhinav Asthana 23:33 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, 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 one character is off, uh, 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, is basically how you connect, like- Uh, you know, your smartphone to your web server, so you have different, uh, applications talking to each other. So it's a pretty universal thing, and it kind of is in some ways even invisible to a certain extent, and that's what kind of made it harder for people to use then. Like, most developers don't really know, uh, how deep certain things are. So the first version of the product really allowed and simplified a lot of those interactions for developers who are working with APIs, and over time, the complexity grew to basically use any API. So it could be configured to call, like, your enterprise web service, or it could be used to call your, uh, smartphone app's API. There were lots of different technical details in it, but the end outcome always was that if you wanna get access to an API, you just do this within a few clicks. That's what the product let you do.

Brett Berson 25:11 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 Asthana 25:19 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. Like, I was writing code. Like, my, 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 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, like, at a healthcare company, or you were at a Fortune 500, like, I had no idea what, like, SOAP looked like, for example, or, you know, later GraphQL looked like. So those things I had to learn through user feedback a lot. And, uh, and I, 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 Berson 26:14 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 Asthana 26:21 It would be false to say that I wasn't pleased. You know, it was something that was always I wanted and not, like, having to push, but people coming and saying, "Hey, I love this thing." If people say, "I'm not using Postman," I actually-- like, I would be depressed for the day. [chuckles] So every time people would come up and say, "Oh, I'm using Postman," it was amazing. And I also was, like, nervously excited, like, you know, what can I do and, and, and improve? So in initial days, I think that continued for a while. I was active in communities, uh, like Stack Overflow or, uh, other forums where I would talk about the product or I would just be helpful to people, and I would slide in, "Hey, you know, I'm building this thing if you wanna use it." And, and the response was always positive. The biggest surprise for me was when, uh, Google reached out to feature Postman on the Chrome Web Store. They're building a version two of their web store, and Postman was one of the top 20 apps to be, uh, recommended, and that was a surprise. That was-- I was, like, totally hallucinating at this point if I'm getting a call from somebody who's actually there. So after that, it kind of felt a lot more real.

Brett Berson 27:30 When did you decide that it could be a full-time thing and you were gonna go actually leave the startup that you were at and go try to turn this into a company? And did it start, "I'm gonna turn this into a big company," or it was just, "People seem to like this. Let me go work on it full time"?

Abhinav Asthana 27:45 I had this intuition that I need to go see this, like, 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. Like, 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 code repository, outside of my ID, Postman is the one thing that I just cannot let go of, that was like a big light bulb moment. And, uh, I started digging deep into, at that point, like, what do APIs mean for organizations? What do APIs mean for developers? And these-- This was the day, by the way, I think Stripe was probably founded, you know, 2011. And to me, I think that was just kind of the tip of the iceberg, so to say, like, what people thought of as APIs and how they actually are. And I was like, I have been at Yahoo. I saw the internals of, of, you know, big company at that point, and they had, like, 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. And I could-- 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 gonna be big as a company. And I think every year since then, I've, I've always thought this could be a bigger company than what I thought it could be last year.

Brett Berson 29:17 And so what were the first few decisions or things that you did when you said, "I'm gonna go work on this full time"?

Abhinav Asthana 29:25 The first few things were I had to figure out how to make money, [chuckles] you know, uh, without actually going and raising money. I think, uh, the idea of which YC's Paul Graham alludes to is be ramen profitable was, was very appealing. I read a lot of Paul Graham essays 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, uh, I found a lot of ways to do that once I got to that point,

Abhinav Asthana 29:57 finding the right co-founders, and I ended up working with Ankit, who I'd 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 their skill set, people you can trust, like, absolutely. And, and they are in this for the right reasons, which is what you want to build as a product and a company, and not for anything else. And fortunately, I had Ankit, and then I found Abhijit

Brett Berson 30:27 What was the process like to get the two of them on board? And did you talk to lots of people? 'Cause you-- And you also had a product that was successful or 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 Asthana 30:40 It was, uh, different, I think, how I was recruited to be a co-founder. I met Ankit a coup- a bunch of times, and because we are close, like, you know, we, we, we had lived each, uh, with each other in each other's apartments while hanging out. You know, 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. Like, you know, he had a high-paying job. He had a, he had a much better career. He went to Yahoo, he went to Adobe, and then he went, uh, and worked at another successful company. So I had to really kind of figure out how to pull him out of it. Uh, and having the traction helped, but we also had to divide responsibilities around what is, what does this mean? It's not just answering feature requests, uh, and, and really just keep coding. That's, 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's a-- 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, uh, once that idea became clear, we recruited, uh, Abhijit to first join us as an engineer. But he was so good, and he was so, you know, 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, and we formally started the company later.

Brett Berson 32:13 How did you convince the two of them?

Abhinav Asthana 32:15 With Abhijit, it was easier. I think we had worked together. He was-- You know, we called him and, 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, we had, you know, it was Ankit and I, maybe he felt safer. With Abhijit, it was like we called him, we said, "Do you wanna be joining this thing? Do you wanna be a co-founder?" He said, "Yes." So he just started. Not a lot of work there. Uh-

Brett Berson 32:39 That's great

Abhinav Asthana 32:39 ... but with Ankit, he had to leave something, and he had to take a big bet, and, uh, 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, right? 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, you know, 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 Berson 33:20 And so what were the types of conversations that you would have in those very early days, the two or three of you?

Abhinav Asthana 33:25 I think a lot of that was focused in the early days on building because we had something going. Like, you know, it's not like we are sitting here and be like, "Yeah, let's figure out what we're gonna do next month." We, we have people really asking for stuff, and we are, like, finding out what is the fastest way to production for them. So a lot of-- Like, that was just exhilarating, right? You don't have to think, you just have to 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, like, our culture.

Abhinav Asthana 34:01 Like, how do we like to work? Like, we like to trust each other. We have extreme curiosity. So a big chunk of our time was, you know, 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, like, who's gonna be the CEO? In this case, I was very clear that this is a, 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, we need to decide that I'm the CEO. You know, correspondingly that Ankit has to be the CTO in those phases to really take the product, like, off the ground. And I think that conversation helped us each have, like, clarity of responsibilities. I saw that a lot of founding teams don't do this and then becomes very crazy later.

Abhinav Asthana 34:50 So I think having those uncomfortable conversations in the beginning, I was like, "I'm, I'm gonna be very scrappy. We need to be very scrappy. We're not gonna raise a lot of money. We're not gonna have a shiny office. We are hackers, and we're gonna build." So we rented an apartment in Bangalore, and Ankit and I lived together. We moved in.

Brett Berson 35:06 It's funny how many founding stories start that way, of just living together.

Abhinav Asthana 35:09 Yeah. He moved-- He left his job, came over to Bangalore. We rented an apartment, and, uh, we had three rooms. The, the first room was the office, and then I had one room, and he had one room. We got a dog together. [chuckles]

Brett Berson 35:22 Why?

Abhinav Asthana 35:23 So, you know-

Brett Berson 35:23 You just wanted company?

Abhinav Asthana 35:25 We just wanted company, you know. So, so it was a longer story, but, you know, we, we just thought it would be nice to have a dog around. And, and he-- we actually-- Cooper, he's, he's with us in the US. The dog is with us.

Brett Berson 35:35 All these years later?

Abhinav Asthana 35:36 Yeah. [laughs] So, so we had, uh... There are things you could do that you can't do here, and, and we were scrappy, and we were making some money on the side. So you just start having fun together.

Brett Berson 35:48 How-- So how did you get Ramen profitable before you raised money?

Abhinav Asthana 35:51 Yeah. So I tried a lot of things. I tried donations. I tried, you know, if you can believe it, some forms of advertising or sponsorship. Uh, I was getting paid five hundred dollars a month by three companies, uh, you know, one of them. Then because I had built an app, I was familiar with the in-app purchase model, and that was I-- that was what I built. Ten dollars lifetime in-app purchase, extremely bad pricing decision, and, uh, it just started selling. Like, you just go to the product, hit a limit, and you start buying. And, and soon, um, you know, started making thousands of dollars a month.

Brett Berson 36:26 And that's ultimately what became the path to monetization?

Abhinav Asthana 36:29 We made that free We went to collaboration and a recurring SaaS model, uh, when we monetized eventually in 2000-- late 2016, '17. So monetization happened for Postman way later. And the problem that we observed was why are people buy-- Like, people started coming to us with this issue of license management and, uh, sharing of these APIs with each other. And we thought it's an in-app purchase, so it's b-bought by user, but they were buying it in bulk. So there's something happening in the team dynamic that we needed to study. So after we raised around... 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, uh, 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 people will still sign up for this thing?" And actually, that was the best pricing test we kind of ever did. And within our first month, we had about fifty, sixty customers just start right away. Stripe was a big part of it. You know, we had to incorporate in the US, get Stripe billing in place. And, uh, there's a story we tell at our company, like Abhijit, who was demoing our Stripe integration. You know, we, we hold, we hold a weekly demo day, and he was like, "Yeah, so this is how this thing works." And, you know, the sale comes through. We were like, "Great. You know, great job, Abhijit. We got our demo," you know. But actually, it was a real customer. And everybody's like, "Holy shit, you know, we just got a... We are in business now." You know, like, so it, it changed very dramatically for us once we got our first few customers.

Brett Berson 38:23 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 Asthana 38:32 The company formally started in late 2014 and actually effectively early 2015. That's, uh, we officially incorporated in 2014. We had a million-dollar inbound, like kind of seed round or so, which we rolled into a seven-million-dollar total round in our Series A. We had about five, six people by the end of 2016. I might be wrong, might be ten people or so. But my intent was to actually come to the US because that's where I wanted-- you know, I just wanted to be next to our customers. So I was traveling, I was meeting customers, people who were excited, enthusiastic.

Brett Berson 39:06 And this was still the Chrome extension product?

Abhinav Asthana 39:07 This is still a Chrome extension.

Brett Berson 39:09 Wow.

Abhinav Asthana 39:09 You could, you could go quite far. Eventually, we transitioned to the new Chrome app platform, which was also deprecated. So both of these things are deprecated. I can talk a lot about API deprecations, how, you know, [chuckles] how they hurt. Uh, eventually we built our own platform, uh, based on Electron, and we have kind of like, you know, we, we do-- 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, uh, making, you know, kind of recurring revenue, which grew, you know, two hundred percent first few years, then a hundred percent for the subsequent years. And eventually in 2017, I moved here and started kind of really thinking about go-to-market from a broader lens

Abhinav Asthana 39:59 after I moved here.

Brett Berson 40:00 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." Like, what-- how did you decide what to build in what order in 2014 and 2015 and 2016?

Abhinav Asthana 40:14 There's 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, uh, I would have a hypothesis that this is how the world is operating. Uh, so a key insight we built was that if you're building an API, it is gonna be used by someone else, which is like an obvious thing, right? 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, like, sharing graphs of, uh, 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, and that became a key insight to drive a lot of the decisions around what we're gonna build in the product next. So we built a collaborative workspaces product. We built public workspaces later. We built partner workspaces. And these problems were 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, like, what they are building and how that is important and what the next phase looks like. I spoke to a lot of CTOs in 2018, and, uh, oftentime you-- when you'd ask them about microservices or service-oriented architecture, they would get it. But when you 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 talk to people, they're like, "Yeah, we are API first. Of course, we are building APIs." But that education was done over the years by us and of course by, by some of the people in the industry. So having that balance of, like, 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, but even if we have both of these ends I still have wanted to push the boundary a little bit, being bit, bit un- uh, uncomfortable. Like earlier this year, we launched an agent platform as well because we are like, okay, if APIs are gonna 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 kind of kept pushing a bit, and that o-oriented

Abhinav Asthana 43:00 a lot of our roadmap.

Brett Berson 43:01 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 Asthana 43:20 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, uh, customer-facing folks in go-to-market teams who were some of the most enthusiastic, like, supporters of the product. And they were like, "Postman has changed my life." And to this day, we, 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 is, has always been and continues to be our core, uh, base. The tension came from what is the level of simplicity we can have in the product without alienating developers. Like if you go full steam into a developer product, you can, you know, 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, you know, we had to really, like, stress on.

Brett Berson 45:05 And that was a decision made very early.

Abhinav Asthana 45:07 Very early. Yeah. Like, uh, we were like, okay, if you are sharing an API with each other and this anyone, you know, it's, 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 the direction where it is a Photoshop, where it is a, you know... I mean, I, I, I [chuckles] at one point, I built 3D models as well on 3ds Max, so you could go there, you know. 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, you know, 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 this balance between how much of preference you give to their freedom and how much control you give to the IT admin became a big point of friction.

Brett Berson 46:02 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 Asthana 46:18 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 it was, I think first I started with that challenge. Distribution was really not... Like, it, it continues to grow even now. Like, there are millions of, you know, users who come in without us paying, you know, anything on advertising even now, and I think that came from really just continuing to focus on, on the best-in-class product. So we first started with building community in San Francisco. Like, not too far from here, I, you know, we got into a co-working space, and we held our first meetup, and I was, like, super scared, like, who's gonna show up? You know, a company that started in India, like, nobody knows about it. And in the first meetup, we had, like, 50 people just show up, and it was, you know, like, okay, we have to go and like, you know, do, do community here. And much more in a natural sense versus an artificial sense of like, you know, okay, we are g- here to sell you products. We are here to sell you products. You know, I had to build a deck. I had to talk about something. So I showed up and, and told people what, what we are building, and I was like, "It's gonna fall flat. I think nobody gets our messaging. Nobody will get it." And then [chuckles] and this one guy started with like, "You know, I have come to this meetup with these five things I want to ask you about why they are not in the product and how are you gonna solve for it." You know? And, uh, I was, like, terrified. I was like, you know, I'm gonna answer in front of 50 people who I don't know before, first meetup ever. And what happened, which was very magical, was someone e-else answered in the audience that we have solved two or three of these things. We can talk after the meetup. You know? 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 we have solved-- If we have given the, uh, right building blocks to developers and they can figure it out, then they will teach each other. So, so a lot of that stuff happened over the meetup, and we continued that, that process, uh, you know, after that.

Brett Berson 48:21 What was hard about messaging the product or communicating what you were trying to do?

Abhinav Asthana 48:26 We're talking to multiple, uh, 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, with an API client, but it's much more than an API client. So what, what, what is it became a big- Part of the challenge. Like, is it like an ID for APIs? But if it's an ID 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? So, and is it even a platform in that sense? So we at, at, you know, during the... I think during one year we call it an API development environment. So those were like common challenges we, we faced. Eventually, we settled on API collaboration platform as an overarching theme with the desktop app kind of being the client and the development environment. And as the platform expanded on-- 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, was very hard.

Brett Berson 49:37 What could you do with a product without

Brett Berson 49:39 paying? And then what was the dividing line to, to need a license?

Abhinav Asthana 49:42 So we put the dividing line, uh, as collaborating beyond three users as, 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 Berson 50:04 Was that an intuitive decision?

Abhinav Asthana 50:06 From our early experiments, it-- 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 there is... like, this is gonna scale up to the entire organization. And it's not just a team product, it's actually like a multi-team or a platform product. In most organizations, uh, at the scale when they have, you know, more than five hundred 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 this sort of these patterns to emerge. Uh, but deliberate design for it was harder.

Brett Berson 50:59 What else about the setup allowed the product to be used by so many different types of companies and types of, um, and scales of businesses?

Abhinav Asthana 51:09 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. Like, just having that conviction and just keep going at it. Like, we just never stopped. Like, and we still continue to this day. Like, we have launched MCP support over the last couple of months. I think we're gonna do A to A as well. But just knowing that those early signs, you know, whether Graph- whether it's GraphQL or gRPC, like having, you know, 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, uh, like how that usage translates into enterprise gave us like a lot of conviction. Um, beyond that, we also expanded a lot on the platform side. Like, we added tools for documentation, automation, API monitoring. We have, uh, tools for service observability. We added tools for governance. Like, 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, why... you know, I'm, I'm paying you as a platform, why can't you just do it?" This became like a very simple, like answer. So we now marry like the developer side of it, which is just shared option 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 Berson 52:43 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 Asthana 52:49 You know, 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. Like, i- 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, you know, twenty milliseconds or forty milliseconds. But where a button should be is, is, you know, kind of my opinion. So we can't waste time on that. And soon we found out that, uh, really people were not interested in contributing to it, and if they were contributing to it, we just have to say no. So if, if we had open source, you would have a product with like, you know, thirty buttons, uh, seventy toggles with, you know, five hundred 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. We're taking the components that could be open source, we kept them open source. And, and developers actually reacted well to it.

Brett Berson 54:03 How do you think the company is different because it was started in India?

Abhinav Asthana 54:07 I think the climate in, in the Valley and Bangalore actually changed quite dramatically over the last ten years. I would have said if I was st- I was-- we were talking about in this in twenty fourteen that, "Oh, yeah, you know, Indian companies are scrappy, raise less money." Indian companies raise a lot of money. [chuckles] There is m- money now faster sometimes. So... and, and some of them have like, uh, global ambition. I think the big thing for me was that I wanted to build a category leading global product, uh, 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

Abhinav Asthana 54:43 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 can be 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, like there's a lot of short-term thinking that sometimes can come in. Pay packages balloon, like average salaries probably have grown 5X, 6X, and that's like the state of the market. But I think in building companies for the long term and really treating stock as, as a core currency was something that is 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 companies that are better than us really changed our culture like a lot. I think the parts that I, I do love is, uh, you know, we-- I mean, Amazon is a good example there to borrow from. Like, 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 can, like, you know, you don't need too much to make an impact on developers, and you can keep going. So during the times when I think, uh, everyone was raising, you know, I'd say a, 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 Berson 56:19 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 Asthana 56:30 When it became clear that this is gonna be what I believe is a multi-billion-dollar business with just our first product, it was like, okay, how much to-- how much is available? What, what's the timing here? I heard Stewart Butterfield from Slack say it at a conference that, you know, if the money is available on good terms, you just take it. And the money was available [chuckles] and on good terms, so I took it, and it allowed us to invest. But also, you know, we had to say no at, at times when we didn't want to take it because it would have been a bit too much. So I think that was the reasoning behind it. It allowed us to invest in more products, get h-higher quality talent, and those are, those are the reasons. And eventually I kind of see how, how does it serve customers, and I think we've, we've kept that going.

Brett Berson 57:16 What do you make of the fact that, you know, 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 for yourself, and you accidentally created... Have you thought about sort of what there is to be learned by that, from that dynamic, if anything?

Abhinav Asthana 57:40 So what I think I learned from that was you really have to have both of these states of belief and disbelief like at the same time, which is like kind of this big paradox always in your head. Like, you have to be-- like, I have extreme belief in this one thing that is gonna be working very, very well, but I also have this conscience or, 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," you know, blood, sweat, tears, and, and just, you know, it doesn't matter. Market doesn't care anymore, right? So I think we get-- oftentimes I would get too transfixed by that. And in this thing, you kind of-- what I felt was, yeah, this is a thing that, that really the market wants. And I think that is a very hard thing to keep in mind, like at all times and take the right calls through it. And I felt like every time I'd failed, I'd go back at it. I was like, you know, yes, the hypothesis was correct, but I also just went a bit too far in, you know, believing we could do it. Like, yeah, a social street view for the world captured through phones is a great idea. I mean, at this point, like, we were talking about the metaverse a while ago, and I was like joking we are like thirteen years too early in the metaverse, and the idea is gonna come back. Like, you know, Apple's trying out like augmented reality as well. But you just can't will it, you know, if, if the customers are not ready. And I think what happens is that when you're building the product, you get so sucked into wanting it to be successful that you just lose that judgment. So, 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. Like, you know, some-something is just done, and, and you move on. [chuckles] I think with a bigger company, with a successful company, you have to find a space which is, uh, is just always keeps on growing. And I felt like with Postman, with software development, you know, it's, it's an, it's an always growing space. Like software is never done. There are new techniques, there is new technology, and we just happen to be in, be in this place, and we have to continue owning that place, you know, over time.

Brett Berson 59:53 How does this translate when you think about, you know, a star employee that decided they want to start 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 Asthana 1:00:08 One thing I feel like, uh... So we have had people in the company who've been here like eight, nine, ten years, and if anyone who is really a star employee, I do make sure they don't leave. You know, they have-

Brett Berson 1:00:19 You tell them what a bad idea it is.

Abhinav Asthana 1:00:20 [laughs]

Brett Berson 1:00:21 You're, you're gonna have a miserable life. [laughs]

Abhinav Asthana 1:00:25 I say, "Are you sure?" You know, that probably says a lot. Uh, but we make sure that, you know, they see the value of the stock that they're gonna accrue in Postman-

Brett Berson 1:00:32 Exactly

Abhinav Asthana 1:00:32 ... you know.

Brett Berson 1:00:33 Let's say a non-employee comes to you.

Abhinav Asthana 1:00:35 Yeah. [laughs] I think, uh, I try to dig into like the reasons of why they're doing it and, and is it really do they just wanna build a company and, and have their freedom? Like if you think that's the way, then yeah, you're, you know, it's free. But it's not. You're accountable to your employees, your investors, your customers, and, and it's- You know, you're not-- uh, 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 like that way. My, my serious piece of advice is always, you know, make sure you're, you're doing this for the next ten years, you have the right co-founders, and you hire the right team. And my kind of partly half-serious advice is to always never spare money for the lawyer or the accountant. Don't skimp on that. Uh, skimp on the office if you need to.

Brett Berson 1:01:26 It's amazing what cheap lawyering will do to your company.

Abhinav Asthana 1:01:29 Yes.

Brett Berson 1:01:29 It, it, it's-

Abhinav Asthana 1:01:29 You find out, like-

Brett Berson 1:01:30 'Cause lawyer debt is more expensive than tech debt.

Abhinav Asthana 1:01:33 Correct. So many people, like we've hired, like, yeah, what is the problem with that company? Oh, we signed contracts we shouldn't have signed.

Brett Berson 1:01:38 You talk a lot about the underpinnings of the company's success is building something great for developers, building a great developer experience, which is often ignored. What, what does that actually mean?

Abhinav Asthana 1:01:49 There's this idea of like, uh, being in a state of flow when you are engaged in deep work. And unfortunately, most of the software that we have created over the last twenty years is anything but that. We have collaborative software that always is-- You know, 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 [chuckles] than the thing you're doing. You know? So... And, and I could get started about consumer software for like another two hours, right? So if-- What, what building software for developers is, to me, like how do they engage in the state of flow and deep work, which is really in, in line with what they're trying to accomplish. And that means, you know, you have to eliminate friction from tiny areas that you would not even see unless you're kind of doing the task. You have to bring in the right context at the right time. You have to-- You know, 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, is critical. Like, and that's why it's very-- designing for Postman is very hard, especially when you're building for collaboration, because we can't jam like, you know, ten notifications in that. Like, people hate it. They, they start yelling. We put a screen in saying that, "Hey, do you want to read a tutorial?" People will-- Like, we get, you know, hate mail on, on our support channel, right? So because it distracts people from like deep work that they're doing. So that's how I saw it.

Brett Berson 1:03:37 And that's how you've always thought about it in terms of like the design paradigm of the product?

Abhinav Asthana 1:03:42 Yeah. I would say I, I, I myself could do a better job of sticking to it. It's, 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, uh, you know, things. And sometimes I've given in into that, but, but I always have to remove it.

Brett Berson 1:03:57 So I, I wanted to wrap up where we always do with sort of the question: Who's been the most influential person in your life or, or in building the company that's not a family member? And what is it that they have imparted on you?

Abhinav Asthana 1:04:14 I think Charlie Man- Munger said, you know, like, "You should make friends with the eminent dead." So I liked that phrase a lot. Like, 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 are learning the logo language and how they explore like worlds. So I think both of them I would cite as influences, things that I go back to and, and check my own thinking against. With respect to people who influenced me was 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, uh, at different stages, there have been different people that I would go to and say, you know, "I, I find myself in a situation and, uh, I should, you know, I seek your advice." I think one of our board members, Ram Gupta, is an independent board member. We started, uh, in, uh, twenty fifteen. I think was a big influence in just having a voice.

Brett Berson 1:05:26 Are there specific conversations that come to mind or things they imparted on you?

Abhinav Asthana 1:05:30 At many times, there are, there is like a fifty-one forty-nine divide, whether, you know, okay, should we-- you know, like 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, was useful. Like at some point I got the advice I should just, you know, focus much more on hiring. And I was like, that's great advice. You know? Like 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 are debugging a problem, we need people who can have that independent, uh, voice and, and tell you how it is. So he was one of those folks.

Brett Berson 1:06:07 Good place to end. Thank you so much for doing this with us.

Abhinav Asthana 1:06:10 Thanks for having me.

Brett Berson 1:06:11 Yeah.

Abhinav Asthana 1:06:11 Yeah, it was a deep conversation. [outro music]