Coder is a company that has completely transformed software development with its browser-based cloud development environment (CDE). Pulse 2.0 interviewed Coder CEO Rob Whiteley to learn more about the company.
Rob Whiteley’s Background
Before joining Coder, Whiteley served as the CMO and GM of NGINX – an open-source web server and proxy acquired by F5. And Whiteley said:
“I focused on leading product strategy and development for all open source, software, and SaaS solutions. Specifically, I oversaw engineering, product management, and marketing.”
“I come at product strategy from a go-to-market perspective. I have 20+ years of experience in the field, including leading marketing, product, and analyst teams for companies like Hedvig, Riverbed, and Forrester. I’ve been able to leverage my experience working with enterprise IT and DevOps customers to drive demand for modern IT infrastructure solutions. From the moment I met Coder co-founders Kyle Carberry and Ammar Bandukwala, I knew Coder was a natural fit. From my previous experience, I developed a deep passion for open source and software development, and Coder is at the intersection of both. Kyle and Ammar brought me on as CEO in May 2023, to help accelerate growth and build on Coder’s culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.”
Formation Of Coder
How did the idea for the company come together? Whiteley shared:
“Coder began as a fun project. The three original co-founders, Kyle Carberry, Ammar Bandukwala, and John Andrew Entwistle, met online while in high school. Their free time was spent building and monetizing Minecraft plugins and servers, eventually moving on to a series of other projects. When building these projects they frequently ran into frustrations with the amount of time they spent moving code from their local laptops to the online gaming servers. They opined that all developers must suffer similar complexities when collaborating remotely on software development. Coder began as they tried to fix this problem, first releasing an open source project, which attracted serious investor interest and they quickly developed a commercial version built atop that open source. They brought me on after seeing initial, repeatable success in developer productivity. My goal is to scale that.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Whiteley reflected:
“My favorite memory is before I even started! I was in the final interview stages with Kyle and Ammar. The last step was the dreaded ‘face-to-face meeting.’ Kyle and Ammar flew from Austin to the Bay Area to meet me at my house. Little did I know, but they had a test for me: Be coherent while hiking up a mountain! And that’s exactly what we did. We headed to a nearby trail and hiked up to the summit. The whole time they were asking questions. It was shockingly effective. Once you get out of the typical Zoom or conference room experience, you open up. It was my first introduction to how “flow state” is not only a value proposition for our customers, but a cultural value of the company. Do the work in a way where you can be most effective and productive. Ends up for interviews, it’s several thousand feet up above the treeline. And if it doesn’t work out, at least you got to take in a great view! Luckily for me, it worked out.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Whiteley explained:
“Today, Coder is a single-product company. Right now, we’re all about Coder (both Open Source and Enterprise versions) which is our differentiated cloud development environment (CDE). It gives developers a magic coding experience – enabling them to access the power, security, and availability of cloud computing from their local devices. It’s really the first cloud-native development experience that doesn’t dictate the developer experience – we support any infrastructure, git repo, and developer environment. Because Coder is self-hosted software, we’re the first CDE that any enterprise can use – no matter how strict their security and compliance requirements are.”
“We’re big on developer autonomy. That’s where ‘Developer Self-Service’ comes into play. We’re handing the reins over to developers, letting them fine-tune their cloud environments with adjustable knobs for infrastructure elements. We also have a variety of editors in the mix including, Web IDEs, JetBrains Gateway, VS Code Remote, giving developers the freedom to decide how their environments roll on a per-directory basis. Coder is all about boosting the developer experience and productivity. We’ve crafted this powerful tool in a user-friendly framework, all to get and keep developers in flow. Developers in flow state are happier, write better code, and generate more business value.”
“Coder does this by centralizing all development activities and source code within an organization’s internal infrastructure, providing engineers with access to robust private or public cloud resources while mitigating risks associated with vulnerable endpoints. Coder achieves this by generating each environment from a pre-configured image, guaranteeing security, consistency, and reproducibility. This approach enables agile resource allocation among teams, allowing them to meet objectives without the need for time-consuming reconfigurations of development environments.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Whiteley faced in building the company? Whiteley acknowledged:
“I think the entire technology sector is facing economic headwinds. As of this moment, we’re not seeing any recessionary indicators. However, most enterprises fear one is coming and they are adjusting spend accordingly. It means you better be on the “must have” and not “nice to have” spectrum of technology investment. Thankfully, developer productivity is a hot area of investment. Developers create the digital applications and services needed for companies to weather disruption. If you can help make developers 20% more productive, then you’re looking at millions to tens of millions of dollars in productivity gains.”
Evolution Of Coder’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Whiteley noted:
“Coder’s technology is constantly evolving. We’re focused on meeting the urgent needs of developers and letting them code the way they want to, and with that comes constant listening and adapting.”
“After launching our open source product in 2019, we quickly began working on a solution for enterprises. We introduced Coder Enterprise which seamlessly coordinates comprehensive development environments that are adaptable to both public and private clouds. This initial version was designed to give every developer their own personalized container to run their workspace. Well, we quickly found out that the leading-edge software shops were actually trending away from containers to VMs for their developers. Why? Because they’re power users and they need the autonomy and lack of resource contention to power their workspace. So, we pivoted. By incorporating Terraform under the hood, Coder now supports both containers and VMs and provides enterprises with choice.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Whiteley cited:
“Coder has achieved several significant milestones along its journey. In March 2019, the release of code-server marked a pivotal moment, providing users with a powerful, accessible remote development platform. It quickly went viral – becoming the most popular OSS project on GitHub in 2019. Following this success, Coder garnered investor attention, raising $11.5 million in Series A funding and later raising $30 million in Series B funding.”
“The company’s commitment to openness and collaboration became evident in June 2022 when Coder open sourced its enterprise-grade cloud development environment, a more comprehensive developer solution than just the browser IDE that code-server delivers. In the past year, Coder surpassed 75,000 stars on GitHub, doubled revenue, and saw its largest customers deploy tens of thousands of daily active users on the Coder platform.”
“Most recently, we announced Coder 2.0, with support for a new developer self-service spec called Dev Containers, a template marketplace we call the Registry, and out-of-the-box integrations with popular tools from JFrog, Hashi, and Backstage. There are many more milestones to come, but we’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far and the impact we’ve had on developers across the world.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Whiteley about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Coder’s customers come from a variety of industries and the sky’s the limit for what Coder can help teams accomplish, literally. One success story is with Skydio, an autonomous drone manufacturer, that faced challenges in deploying updates and managing developer workstations for their complex drone development projects. They came to Coder to implement a flexible and cost-effective solution to help reduce cloud computing. After working together they reduced costs by 90%, streamlined onboarding times from a week to as little as an hour, and achieved enthusiastic adoption by a third of Skydio developers. Coder continues to support Skydio in building cutting-edge drone technology, exemplifying its impact on productivity and efficiency in the cloud-based development environment.”
Funding
After asking Whiteley about the company’s funding information, he revealed:
”In 2018, Coder raised its first seed funding round of $4.5 million. Shortly after the company raised $8.4 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, and not even a year later in 2020, raised an additional $30 million in Series B funding led by GGV Capital. We have the luxury of being in a good cash position and focusing on growth. As for revenue, we don’t disclose specifics but I can say we doubled revenue last year (and the year before), and we only see growth accelerating.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Whiteley assessed:
“We don’t look at TAM through the traditional lens of technology markets. We look at it through the lens of developers.”
“There are more than 11 million developers in the Global 2000 serviced by Platform Engineering teams. This is Coder’s ideal customer profile (ICP).”
“Gartner predicts that 80% of enterprises will have Platform Engineering teams by 2026. Unlike other DevOps roles (e.g. Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE), Platform teams exist solely to provide an internal developer platform. Their role is to operate an internal SaaS offering for their developers – optimized around developer choice, rather than corporate standards. Platform teams are held accountable to developer productivity metrics. For example, Palantir measures its Platform team by “time to first commit” (TTFC), the amount of time for a developer to start at Palantir (or start a new project) and commit his or her first line of code to the corporate git repository. Coder reduced Palantir’s TTFC from 15 days to 1 hour.”
“So, we derive our TAM from the ability to boost this productivity with what the market is now calling a Cloud Development Environment (CDE). CDEs solve the problem of developer onboarding, be it at the time of hire or the start of a new project. Based on TTFC and other productivity outcomes for customers, we estimate Coder drives a 10-20% boost in developer productivity. Not all developers benefit from a CDE (e.g. mainframe / COBOL developers), and customers tell us on average that two-thirds of their developers can be transitioned to a solution like Coder. At a cost of $750/developer, there is $6B in TAM available in just the Global 2000.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Coder from its competition? Whiteley affirmed:
“One important way Coder stands out from its competition is through its commitment to providing a self-hosted solution for cloud development environments (CDEs), a distinctive approach in a market where Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the norm. While SaaS has been the preferred software licensing and delivery model among startups for the last 15+ years, we’re seeing a trend (or countertrend) of businesses opting for the self-hosted deployment model. Organizations are opting for self-hosted software over SaaS software more and more for the additional security, compliance, and ROI that the deployment model offers. Unlike competitors, Coder allows customers to download and deploy the product themselves, offering enhanced control over the development environment. This unique self-hosted model caters to customers’ preferences for better skill sets and improved security and compliance, setting Coder apart from competitors that only offer a SaaS model currently.”
“Ultimately, Coder’s secret sauce lies in its dedication to creating a seamless developer experience. The platform is designed to be as easy to install as SaaS while maintaining the compliance and customizability expected of traditional, self-hosted software. This emphasis on user-friendly installation, coupled with a focus on compliance, positions Coder as a solution that not only boosts developer productivity but also addresses critical security and compliance concerns, giving it a competitive edge in the crowded CDE market. Looking ahead, CDEs that do not offer a self-hosted deployment model will miss out on business and get left behind as this important trend gains momentum.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Whiteley concluded:
“In the next year, we’re aiming for Coder to become a multiproduct company. Our philosophy thus far has been to create one really good product to secure self-hosted development environments (and do it well) instead of spreading ourselves too thin trying to release multiple products at once. The next product we release will have the same goals in mind: give developers time back, boost productivity and keep them in ‘flow,’. Keep coders focused on coding, and make software development fun and flexible.”
“Alongside the creation of net-new products, we are always upgrading our core product, Coder Open Source and the commercial version, Coder Enterprise. We’ve had several recent feature releases including Dev Container integrations, Backstage integration, Template Deprecation Controls, and Workspace Process Monitoring, and have some more exciting ones in the pipeline such as Git-Initialized Workspaces, Workspace Sharing, Multi-Select Parameter Options, and Automated Workspace Cleanup.”
“Our constant product updates are reflective of our agility and flexibility as a company; we’re not rigid and we truly want to help improve the developer experience in whatever way developers need. A cultural value of Coder I’ve come to love is “always tinker.” Roll up your sleeves and just do it and iterate constantly.”
