Pennarun: Tailscale Assembled Founding Team Before Picking a Specific Product
Avery Pennarun · How his $2B startup grew to $10M+ ARR with zero marketing. | Avery Pennarun, Founder of Tailscale · PMF Show · Jun 9, 2025 · at 4:54
Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, explains how he and co-founders David Crawshaw and David Carney banded together before identifying the specific problem to solve.
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“I mean, I started with the name TailScale. I'm like, ah, Somebody's got to do things that make stuff easier. And I guess the initial version was just me going around to my friends saying like, Hey, I'm going to start a startup doing this. What do you think? And some people are like, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Good. Good for you. You do that. And the two Davids were like, Oh, this sounds really interesting. Can I join you? And so once we had the three of us, that's when we went off searching for like, what are we going to build?”
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