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Dec 18, 2021 · 16m · top-founders

Trunk.io Helps you Code Like Google, $3.2m Raised, Official Launch Now

Ellie Schleifer · 9m spoken Nathan Latka · 5m spoken
0:00 / 0:00

gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions

Trunk.io co-founder Ellie Schleifer joins Nathan Latka to discuss raising a $3.25 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz to build developer infrastructure that eliminates pull request bottlenecks and enhances engineering velocity.

How this conversation actually went

Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 35% of the talking time here. How this is scored →

Nathan as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 3.3 Guest disagreement 1.8 Nathan pushing back 3.8
05100:0010:000:48–5:06 · Nathan as informed peer 3/10 Introducing Ellie Schleifer and Trunk.io's Core Problem Ellie explains the technical bottleneck of landing code in large organizations and how Google solved it with dedicated dev tools. Nathan listens and asks clarifying baseline questions about product capabilities and target users.5:07–7:39 · Nathan as informed peer 5/10 Fundraising Strategy and Past Startup Acquisition Nathan challenges Ellie on why he raised institutional VC instead of bootstrapping or pre-selling customer contracts. Ellie defends the VC route as easier and necessary for heavy infrastructure, acknowledging his privilege as a second-time founder.7:41–12:17 · Nathan as informed peer 4/10 Sponsor Spotlight: Managing SaaS Spend with Ramp Following the Ramp sponsor read, Nathan questions Ellie on milestones from his seed deck, team headcount, and go-to-market channels. Ellie discusses focusing on C++ and robotics developer communities.12:17–14:56 · Nathan as informed peer 5/10 Equity Distribution and Long-Term Pricing Philosophy Nathan presses Ellie on valuation and whether dilution was under twenty percent, which Ellie deflects while disclosing an even four-way co-founder equity split. Ellie outlines his pricing philosophy around proving ROI before charging.0:48–5:06 · Guest teaching 5/10 Introducing Ellie Schleifer and Trunk.io's Core Problem Ellie explains the technical bottleneck of landing code in large organizations and how Google solved it with dedicated dev tools. Nathan listens and asks clarifying baseline questions about product capabilities and target users.5:07–7:39 · Guest teaching 3/10 Fundraising Strategy and Past Startup Acquisition Nathan challenges Ellie on why he raised institutional VC instead of bootstrapping or pre-selling customer contracts. Ellie defends the VC route as easier and necessary for heavy infrastructure, acknowledging his privilege as a second-time founder.7:41–12:17 · Guest teaching 3/10 Sponsor Spotlight: Managing SaaS Spend with Ramp Following the Ramp sponsor read, Nathan questions Ellie on milestones from his seed deck, team headcount, and go-to-market channels. Ellie discusses focusing on C++ and robotics developer communities.12:17–14:56 · Guest teaching 2/10 Equity Distribution and Long-Term Pricing Philosophy Nathan presses Ellie on valuation and whether dilution was under twenty percent, which Ellie deflects while disclosing an even four-way co-founder equity split. Ellie outlines his pricing philosophy around proving ROI before charging.0:48–5:06 · Guest disagreement 1/10 Introducing Ellie Schleifer and Trunk.io's Core Problem Ellie explains the technical bottleneck of landing code in large organizations and how Google solved it with dedicated dev tools. Nathan listens and asks clarifying baseline questions about product capabilities and target users.5:07–7:39 · Guest disagreement 3/10 Fundraising Strategy and Past Startup Acquisition Nathan challenges Ellie on why he raised institutional VC instead of bootstrapping or pre-selling customer contracts. Ellie defends the VC route as easier and necessary for heavy infrastructure, acknowledging his privilege as a second-time founder.7:41–12:17 · Guest disagreement 1/10 Sponsor Spotlight: Managing SaaS Spend with Ramp Following the Ramp sponsor read, Nathan questions Ellie on milestones from his seed deck, team headcount, and go-to-market channels. Ellie discusses focusing on C++ and robotics developer communities.12:17–14:56 · Guest disagreement 2/10 Equity Distribution and Long-Term Pricing Philosophy Nathan presses Ellie on valuation and whether dilution was under twenty percent, which Ellie deflects while disclosing an even four-way co-founder equity split. Ellie outlines his pricing philosophy around proving ROI before charging.0:48–5:06 · Nathan pushing back 1/10 Introducing Ellie Schleifer and Trunk.io's Core Problem Ellie explains the technical bottleneck of landing code in large organizations and how Google solved it with dedicated dev tools. Nathan listens and asks clarifying baseline questions about product capabilities and target users.5:07–7:39 · Nathan pushing back 6/10 Fundraising Strategy and Past Startup Acquisition Nathan challenges Ellie on why he raised institutional VC instead of bootstrapping or pre-selling customer contracts. Ellie defends the VC route as easier and necessary for heavy infrastructure, acknowledging his privilege as a second-time founder.7:41–12:17 · Nathan pushing back 3/10 Sponsor Spotlight: Managing SaaS Spend with Ramp Following the Ramp sponsor read, Nathan questions Ellie on milestones from his seed deck, team headcount, and go-to-market channels. Ellie discusses focusing on C++ and robotics developer communities.12:17–14:56 · Nathan pushing back 5/10 Equity Distribution and Long-Term Pricing Philosophy Nathan presses Ellie on valuation and whether dilution was under twenty percent, which Ellie deflects while disclosing an even four-way co-founder equity split. Ellie outlines his pricing philosophy around proving ROI before charging.

speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)

0:00 · Nathan 35.5% · guest 64.5%0:00 · Nathan 35.5% · guest 64.5%3:00 · Nathan 17.5% · guest 82.5%3:00 · Nathan 17.5% · guest 82.5%6:00 · Nathan 66.6% · guest 33.4%6:00 · Nathan 66.6% · guest 33.4%9:00 · Nathan 21.1% · guest 78.9%9:00 · Nathan 21.1% · guest 78.9%12:00 · Nathan 26.4% · guest 73.6%12:00 · Nathan 26.4% · guest 73.6%15:00 · Nathan 51.6% · guest 48.4%15:00 · Nathan 51.6% · guest 48.4%
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 6:45 VC is easier than pre-selling

Ellie bluntly dismisses Nathan's suggestion to pre-sell customers, stating directly that raising VC money is far easier when building large-scale infrastructure.

 Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 6:29 Challenging VC reliance over pre-sales

Nathan presses Ellie on choosing dilution over customer funding, pointing out that Ellie's ability to easily raise VC is a unique privilege not shared by most founders.

 Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:09 The reality of engineering bottlenecks at scale

Ellie educates Nathan on why scaled engineering teams stall out, explaining that landing code through PR gates rather than writing core algorithms is the true bottleneck.

 Nathan holds their own ▶ 12:17 Pressing on seed round dilution metrics

Nathan leverages typical SaaS venture benchmarks regarding 20% dilution to repeatedly drill Ellie on the exact financial terms of his seed round.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
ChapterTopicNathan as informed peerGuest teachingGuest disagreementNathan pushing backWhy
Introducing Ellie Schleifer and Trunk.io's Core Problem 3511 Ellie explains the technical bottleneck of landing code in large organizations and how Google solved it with dedicated dev tools. Nathan listens and asks clarifying baseline questions about product capabilities and target users.
Fundraising Strategy and Past Startup Acquisition 5336 Nathan challenges Ellie on why he raised institutional VC instead of bootstrapping or pre-selling customer contracts. Ellie defends the VC route as easier and necessary for heavy infrastructure, acknowledging his privilege as a second-time founder.
Sponsor Spotlight: Managing SaaS Spend with Ramp 4313 Following the Ramp sponsor read, Nathan questions Ellie on milestones from his seed deck, team headcount, and go-to-market channels. Ellie discusses focusing on C++ and robotics developer communities.
Equity Distribution and Long-Term Pricing Philosophy 5225 Nathan presses Ellie on valuation and whether dilution was under twenty percent, which Ellie deflects while disclosing an even four-way co-founder equity split. Ellie outlines his pricing philosophy around proving ROI before charging.

Statements from this episode (11)

Insight
Schleifer: Landing code feels like 'death by a thousand paper cuts'
“Once you hit like any amount of scale in your organization landing code gets really hard. It's tedious. I kind of describe it as like death by a thousand paper cuts.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 1:23
Assertion Supported
Schleifer: Google coordinates tens of thousands of engineers in one monorepo
“Having been at Google, it's like, it's amazing. You have tens of thousands of engineers landing code all day long in a monorepo and it works.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 1:39
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uber ATG required 30 developer tools engineers to support 600 engineers
“We had 600 engineers at Uber ATG. We had 30 engineers supporting them as dev tools that experience space and landing code is really hard.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 1:55
Insight
Companies must treat internal developer tooling as products, not just firefighting
“I think that the right way to do this is like as a company to take on that responsibility to approach this from a product perspective and not just the firefighting, but to be like, okay, if you're going to build this as a product and not just as a tool, not ju…”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 2:54
Insight
Schleifer: Every repository language should be uniformly linted across all machines
“Every single language, every technology in a modern repository should be checked for a static analysis, formatting, linting the same exact way in every single engineer's box.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 4:11
Disclosure
Schleifer: Trunk.io closed a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz in January 2021
“So we raised we raised money from Andreessen Horowitz. We closed that round back in January.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 5:20
Opinion
Schleifer: Raising VC is significantly easier than pre-selling an unbuilt product
“I mean, if you're going to say what are the different approaches, it's a lot easier to go raise money from VC than it is to go and pre-sell customers on a product. That's like, you know, a straight up answer on that one.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 6:45
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schleifer: Trunk.io's entire 11-person startup team consists strictly of engineers
“Everyone is an engineer, right?”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 10:02
Disclosure
Schleifer: Trunk.io split equity equally among four co-founders
“We are, we're four founder co-founders that put the thing together. That's, yeah, that's how we did it. We're an equal team of a group”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 12:47
Insight
Saving a developer two hours monthly easily justifies developer tooling costs
“Engineers are insanely expensive, right? they're only getting more expensive. And if you can return even like two hours of productivity per engineer per month, you've, you know, paid your paid your way easily.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 14:45
Insight
Schleifer: Engineers must accept that much of what they build gets discarded
“All the all the things you're gonna build, a lot of them are just gonna get thrown away, and that's okay.”
Ellie Schleifer Dec 18, 2021 ▶ 15:58
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