I recently got to chat to my favourite type of CEO; one who codes! And not just one who codes, but one who ALSO maintains an open source framework. Perhaps we are just glutens for punishment!
Asim Aslam was a pleasure to speak to. He talks openly and honestly about his career moves from Halo, to maintaining his microservices open source project to then commercialising that project as M3O. Asim is easy to talk to and this podcast could be catalogued under “easy listening” as he quietly shares his experiences with, and passion for microservices. This passion for his chosen specialty reminded me of a podcast from our archive. Orla Shanaghy spoke to Bonnie Williams (scroll to Episode 35) about public speaking, providing brilliant tips and guidance to developers or founders required to explain what they or their company do! Bonnie explains that you must find your passion for what you do, and then pretend you are talking to your friend at the bar, rather than that contrived “elevator pitch” scenario so beloved by some. That and other tips are in the full 20 minute chat. Enjoy!
Back to Asim, and here are some snippets from our conversation.
Richard Rodger: Asim, it is lovely to have you here today on the Voxgig podcast. Welcome.
Asim Aslam: Thanks for having me, Richard. I really appreciate it.
Richard Rodger: My first question is going to go straight into what you are doing. You're one of those people who has founded an open-source project and then turned it into a startup. Take us through that story; how did that happen?
Asim Aslam: Back in 2015 I was working at this ride-hailing company in London called Hailo; Hailo was a taxi app competing against Uber. And I had joined them to help them replatform and they were effectively migrating to a Go-based microservices stack. And after a couple of years doing that, I realized the power of that technology and architectural pattern.
And I realized that there wasn't any sort of open-source tooling around that. Netflix had been blogging about it. They had something in Java that they were talking about, but there wasn't anything in Go. And my feeling was, if there's Rails for Ruby and there's Spring for Java, then there has to be something for Go. So, I decided to write something, open source it, and then quit my job and focus on it full time. And that's where it started. And I was-
Richard Rodger: I know you did at the start. Was that just, I'm going to do open source, or did you have an idea that it was going to become a company?
Asim Aslam: Well, I – to be honest, I thought it could be a product of a company. I saw what Pivotal had done with Spring and Spring Cloud, which is based on Netflix. Netflix's cloud architecture. And I just thought wow, I could do this in Go for the cloud. And so, my first instinct was; let me try to build something. Let me try to raise some funding.
I knew a few people; I knew some people back then like Alexis Richardson, who was doing Weaveworks, and he was kind enough to make some introductions for me. But ultimately, nothing formulated on the funding side back then, but that was the goal, the ambition. I did feel like this platform and architecture could be a product in a company.
Richard Rodger: And looking at the open source, there's a mountain of work there. The project itself – so, just so we get this right. What's the exact GitHub URL for your project?
Asim Aslam: Well, I would say the – times have changed and things have moved on. But the GitHub URL – the GitHub org is micro, M-I-C-R-O.
Richard Rodger: You've got the – that's a lovely one to get; well done.
Asim Aslam: Exactly. So, this – but the initial project I actually started with was a project called Go Micro, so it's just Go hyphen prefix to that. And the starting point was, "What's the smallest thing that I could put into the hands of the developer that they could use?" And it was this idea of a framework. But the overarching product, company, everything like that, was micro. And the idea of a platform more so than a framework was what I thought about.
The - this is seven years ago, so you start with one thing and then you evolve it. And then over time, you realize that the usage patterns that you had thought existed actually diverge from your own use case to whatever the audience is doing. And so, this is how I ended up with separate projects, effectively.
Richard Rodger: What I like about what you've done is, you've taken it to the next level, which is – a lot of the microservices frameworks, in whatever language, tend to focus on things like the networking and service discovery and circuit breakers and all this stuff. Which is important, but what you've done takes it to the next level, because you're also solving business logic problems, which a lot of frameworks I find just leave to the developer.
Whereas you mentioned Ruby on Rails. If you look at Ruby on Rails, one of its values is that it also solves the business logic problems. Because there is an ecosystem of things that do user management and ecommerce and stuff like that. Was that deliberate, or did it just evolve that way?
Asim Aslam: No, this was always the goal. The whole value of the thing that I saw at Hailo was that we had 100 microservices running on this platform. The framework and the platform itself enabled the development model, but it was the value that was in the services and what you could do those. Because those were powering mobile apps, web apps. Every new service could leverage 100 other services that were already on the platform to perform interesting new features.
And I felt like, how do you put this into the open source? You can't start with all of that; it's very hard to drive adoption through that. So, you have to start with a framework. Then you move on to a platform; then you move on to services. And it was, I think, around about the time that the project had maybe 5,000 stars, that I was able to raise funding to build a hosted – a cloud hosted offering. And part of the iteration through that was, we started to write these services. And it was only recently, like maybe a few weeks ago, where I actually blogged about it and said, "Here's 70+ services that you can leverage."
And coming back to pitching and talking to investors from our Bonnie Williams episode, here Asim gives his experience of how long the process can take….
Richard Rodger: Completely. Especially when you have clients who want to get stuff done. How have you found the experience of moving from open-source maintenance and looking after that community to then, I guess, leveraging that to do a start-up and raise money and all that sort of stuff.
Richard Rodger: Talk us through that history and how that happened. It's fairly inspirational.
Asim Aslam: I think – so as I mentioned, when I started out, I looked at Pivotal and Spring, and even the company before it, Springsource, as inspiration. And the goal was always to raise money to build a team, to build a product and a company. And so, I had a pitch stack very early on; kept iterating on that, kept talking to investors.
And it's a different skillset to switch from – one half of the day, all you're doing is sitting in front of a laptop, coding, to the other part is sitting in a meeting with someone who has no engineering experience and trying to tell them why this is valuable. It took a while; it took maybe four years before I could convince anyone to fund it.
And so, in 2019, I was able to raise a little bit of money and say, "People are continually trying to build and solve these platform problems. We should offer one as a service; here's a popular open-source project that I built, that I think could be that service. And then here's all the things that we could do after we do that." Rather than everyone building all of these bespoke platforms and services, we could all build them in one place and reuse that, and think about the compounding value and velocity of our development then.
And so, I got that done, and then all of a sudden, your gears switch again, so you're not going back to coding; you're going to hiring. You're trying to find people who want to work with you to build this product; you're trying to align them on doing that. You're thinking about product roadmap and payroll and everything else that comes with it.
Richard Rodger: Which is – you're either going, "Can I please just go code?"
Listen to the rest of this honest and warm conversation with Asim, or search Fireside with Voxgig wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll be brought right up to date by Asim… did he get to just go code?!
No one said starting a business, being a developer or doing public speaking was easy, but in Voxgig, we have access to a wonderful network willing to share their experiences on the bits that worked, and sometimes more importantly, the bits that didn’t!