How Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann Went from Being Self-taught to Bootstrapping a Company
🎙 About the episode
Meet Mathias Biilmann 🇩🇰! Matt is CEO and Co-founder of Netlify, a cloud computing company you might have heard of. He's also a self-taught developer who was a music journalist in a past life! In this episode, he talks about bootstrapping a company, and hiring his first developers. He also talks about how he initially learned to code and, eventually, decided to change careers! Yes, this story will also take you to the time before everybody had Internet.
Matt will teach you how to best position yourself as a developer, and why companies in different stages of their development look for different things in their hires. Alex and Matt will discuss the current state of the job market and whether you should be worried about the potential for finding job opportunities. And on top of that, this episode is also about the fascinating story about the inception of a company we all know and love.
🔗 Connect with Matt
⏰ Timestamps
- How Matt started fiddling with a Commodore 64 before becoming a developer was cool (02:07)
- How you would learn coding in the era before everybody was connected to the Internet (03:56)
- Matt pursued musicology, comparative literature, and cultural studies degrees and worked as a freelance music journalist! (05:40)
- How Matt kept coding as a hobby and decided to switch careers after meeting a girl from Spain (06:10)
- Matt’s first notable coding projects: a Sudoku game where you could challenge friends like in Wordle, and a procedurally generated space game (07:24)
- How Matt got his first developer job (09:29)
- Break: Here’s what our community is saying! (11:50)
- How Matt Biilmann went from being an employee to CTO to CEO (14:28)
- Matt had a hunch about the future of the web… And it turned out he was right! (17:04)
- What is Jamstack? (20:38)
- How much code does Matt write today, and how much did he use to write in Netlify’s early days? (23:32)
- What was Netlify looking for in the first developers they hired? (25:45)
- What kinds of developers do early-stage startups need? What are the differentiators between developers with similar backgrounds? (27:57)
- Break: Subscribe! (31:37)
- Why do companies still need to hire junior developers? (32:19)
- Are junior developers a good investment? (37:03)
- Why are there tech layoffs happening right now? (37:49)
- Should you be worried about the current state of the job market? (44:28)
🧰 Resources Mentioned
- Netlify
- Netlify Drop, formerly BitBalloon
- Jamstack
- Scrimba Podcast: How to Avoid Burnout, Improve Your Confidence and Keep Coding Fun, with Scrimba Student Sylvia
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