Episode 16

016 Jonathan Seelig - Cutting Through the Noise

Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Ridge, Jonathan Seelig, joins the show to share his background, insights, and perspective on startups and software technology. Jonathan works with early-stage technology companies as an investor, advisor, and board member. He was previously co-founder of Akamai, which was the world’s first content delivery network. Akamai absolutely changed the Internet as we know it and is still in use today.

Today, Jonathan talks all about the software application market, what he loves about being in infrastructure, and the biggest challenges he’s faced as a leader.

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Key Takeaways

01:18 – Jeff introduces today’s guest, Jonathan Seelig, who joins the show to share his experience founding multiple early stage technology companies, including Akamai

12:36 – How Jonathan came up with the idea for Ridge

15:06 – Challenges in going from Akamai to Ridge

18:40 – Cutting through the noise

20:34 – Big shifts in the software application market

27:01 – Advice Jonathan would give to other startup founders

29:28 – How Jonathan inspires his team

31:00 – The biggest challenges of being a leader of a remote team and qualities Jonathan looks for in a team member

37:27 – What’s next for Jonathan and Ridge

40:07 – Jeff thanks Jonathan for joining the show and lets listeners know where to learn more about Ridge

Tweetable Quotes

“How do you give an application owner that very small quantum unit of being able to buy in a particular geography or market? One of the things that’s been amazing with the hyperscalers, like AWS and GCP, is you can walk in the door, swipe your credit card, start building something, have your first month charge me $3.72 and then keep building and have your charge be $7 and then as you scale up and you become Lyft or Pinterest, now you’re at a couple hundred million bucks.” (10:31) (Jonathan)

“I will say that the Covid years were tricky for me personally, less so maybe for the company, because we have a lot of folks in one place, and having that place inaccessible to me for a couple of years wasn’t a lot of fun.” (17:15) (Jonathan)

“Once you have complied with the standard, you know that you can pick that application up and move it seamlessly. And that, for me, is a big shift in the market.” (23:34) (Jonathan)

“The one thing that I have learned over the years of working with early-stage companies is that across your team you’re generally not gonna fix the places where people aren’t awesome. What you really want to be doing in the startup world is letting people do the things that they are awesome at.” (28:14) (Jonathan)

“To me, the only way that I’ve maintained some of the connection with folks pretty far away has been just to be imminently clear to everybody that my availability is fully open to everyone. I’ll work on any call, any customer engagement, any challenge that we have.” (31:40) (Jonathan)

“One of the most exciting things about being an infrastructure guy is that you do see the opportunity for lots of new things to happen that you haven’t even imagined.” (39:28) (Jonathan)