i recently sat with Orcus Co-founder and CEO Jeu George. Jeu knew he and his peers were on to something exciting.-Founder helped develop a workflow orchestration tool called Conductor during his time at Netflix.
After Netflix open sourced the technology, Jeu saw another opportunity.is a highly scalable platform that helps companies bring innovations to market faster and increase product reliability. So he co-created his Orkes. Orkes offers an enterprise version of Conductor as a cloud-delivered service that customers currently use to orchestrate microservices-based workflows, API gateways, data pipelines, and more.
Jeu was excited to talk about his journey to becoming CEO, the challenges he faced, and the lessons he thinks other startups should know.
How did you become CEO? How did you get to where you are now?
My co-founder and I built a product at Netflix called Conductor, which was later open sourced and widely adopted by many companies. We saw how much it helped a developer improve his GTM speed and realized there was a market opportunity to bring this to even more companies and their development teams. We were in the right place at the right time. That’s when we decided to build a company around this technology.
Conductor is an open source framework for workflow orchestration that allows you to create distributed applications using your programming language of choice. By eliminating the challenges of maintaining and propagating running state, developers can focus on coding the business logic of their applications, rather than on the complexities of building a distributed ecosystem.
How did Netflix’s decision to open source Conductor impact Orkes?
When we started, the idea of open sourcing the technology didn’t exist. The platform was built for general purpose, but its initial use cases were media-centric. But a few months later, when Conductor was making the rounds within the company, the decision was made to open source it.
That decision had two important implications for our early startup. First, we were able to validate that there is a product market for open source solutions like ours. This was a big step, as it can often take companies two to three years to determine product and market fit. Second, being under the Netflix umbrella gave us branding and authority, which was very helpful.
Often when you see successful companies building on open source, one of the reasons for their success is that they were the original founders behind that open source product. is. That was certainly the case with us.
Have you ever thought of becoming a startup entrepreneur?
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but I never really took action until I had the opportunity to build a company using Conductor. I think it’s about being open and receptive rather than actively seeking the perfect idea. My co-founders feel the same way, and maybe the pandemic actually worked in our favor. With no more commuting, I realized I had more time to brainstorm and finally be ready to take the leap into entrepreneurship.
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
My team and I come from a tech and product background, so we’re all about making things. However, when it came to selling the product, I didn’t have much experience in sales and marketing, which was a challenge. However, we are able to learn a lot through the process of working closely with our customers and apply it to our products.
“No one thinks about building data centers anymore when they launch new products and services because they know companies like Microsoft have solved that problem. It’s a way of knowing that has changed.”
A customer has a specific use case for your product and would like to see its capabilities. This is where marketing comes in as they may not know that our product can solve their problem. When people start using it and seeing it solve their problems, word spreads and growth happens. This is a combination of marketing-led growth and product-led growth.
The target audience includes developers who want to create workflows and business people who understand how business orchestration works. Convincing one of these target personas to become a champion will help you scale.
Do you see it as an important way to get your name out there and build on it?
super important. Consider what happened in the cloud market. I no longer think about building data centers when launching new products and services because I know companies like Microsoft have solved that problem. That’s how you know this market has changed.
What we are currently building is an orchestration. This is a layer above the cloud. So it’s a market as big as the cloud itself. In other words, selling directly to companies doesn’t work if you want to capture the entire market. Because you can’t sell to every type of company on the planet. That’s where marketing comes in to let the world know about this new way of building and operating core applications.
Time and time again, we’ve seen that once people start using Conductor, it spreads throughout the company. That’s why getting your foot in the door is so important.
What would you tell other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Starting a company can take two to three years to figure out where your product fits in the market. We took an early advantage by working on a popular open source product and being under the brand umbrella of a popular company, Netflix. We’ve been successful by embracing open source products and building our company around them.
As I mentioned earlier, we believe the market for our product is as big as the cloud itself. Communicating this can change people’s minds about investing with us. Now is the right time to invest. Basically, you want to show them the future. This is where the future is heading, and now is the perfect time to be a part of it.
Orkes is a portfolio startup on the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. To get started with the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub,sign up here.