Yoav Landman - Co-Founder of JFrog

Speaker A: Foreigner Formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future leaning startups. Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show.

Speaker B: Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur, software architect and one of the co founders of JFrog. Over the past two decades he has helped shape the way software is built, managed and delivered across the technology industry. As a co founder and chief technology officer of JFrog, he played a key role in growing the company from an idea among engineers into a publicly traded technology company serving thousands of of organizations worldwide. A uh, recognized thought leader in DevOps, cloud native technologies and software supply chain management, he has spent his career helping develop teams, solve complex challenges at scale while continuing to push the industry forward through innovation and open source contributions. Please welcome Yoav Landman.

Speaker C: Welcome Yoav.

Speaker D: Thank you. Great to be here.

Speaker C: It's great to have you. Let's go ahead and dive right in. Um, so let's talk about before JFrog became a company. You created something called Artifactory. Tell us what problem you were solving for with Artifactory.

Speaker D: So um, when I started Artifactory it was uh, even before JFOG was founded. Artifactory started as an open source uh, project. Um what I was doing back then when I started this was at the end of uh 2006. I was consulting uh, uh to companies about creating software in an automated way. This is where a big change in the market happened where software was uh, starting to get built out of reusable components. Pretty much like you have an airbag in your car and the car manufacturer doesn't manufacture the airbag but rather he oems it from external sources. This is where open source started to bloom, ah initially um, in the Java ecosystem, um, and I was consulting to very uh, large companies. Um, basically this was part of our uh, we are three founders. This was our uh, first uh company together. JFK is our second company together and part uh of this consultancy job was uh, uh being in major thousands of developer organizations. And and what I realized is that is that whenever they lose a uh component because it's not available anymore on the Internet, they may stop working for a few days because they cannot rebuild the software if this component is missing or the server that hosts the component uh, is down. Uh at a very specific turning point was uh, a Server that actually back in the day just went up in flames. So it was very hard for the company to recover, uh, this component that everyone was using, um, and everyone just deleted this component from their own computers trying to uh, recover because this is how developers think, maybe I'll clean it up and it will get resolved automatically. It didn't. And then they were paralyzed. And I thought how come this is the situation that people are still dependent on an open source component from the Internet that exists out there and may disappear at any given point in time. And this led me to create Artifactory as an open source project. Initially, um, I publicized it on Usenet, if anyone remembers what Usenet is. Uh, and it started to create traction really, really quickly. Apparently it solved uh, real pain, maybe in six months. There were uh, 20,000 installations of artifactory back then. It was an on premise, uh, solution and that was the turning point. Once, uh, the adoption was so uh, compelling that it led to the creation of JFlug in 2008.

Speaker B: That's awesome. You uh, aren't the first company that's gone from open source to a full blown publicly uh, traded company. We're excited to hear when uh, you realize it could go from product, uh, to company and maybe some of the steps that you needed to go through, uh, to make this m more proprietary and less open source.

Speaker D: Ah, uh, that's easy. Uh, I mean once you look at the adoption and uh, back then you can relate the IP address of a company to what the company is really which company it really is. You see that the adoption uh, is being done by major enterprises, uh, globally. And then you realize that you're solving a real pain, that you're actually helping enterprises achieve trusted software, which is still what JFK is doing today. Jeffhog is helping companies, uh, deliver trusted software, uh, uh, uh, through the JFHOG platform. So that was a turning point that was uh, very evident that this could be a real business.

Speaker C: That's great, Yoav. Ah. And um, let's go back to the beginning with respect to the naming of the company itself. We found that some founders take months, years to think through what they want to name their business and others don't spend any time at all and kind of come up with some random naming conventions. What's the significance of JFrog? I have a suspicion, but I'd love

Speaker D: your answer, uh, if uh, your guess is right. So j, uh in jfog is actually for Java and Frog, uh today, uh, we know it's the one of the only animals that can only Leap forward. Um, I love that.

Speaker B: I didn't know that.

Speaker D: Yeah, it is. In Australia, they told us it's kangaroo. Uh, also, uh, that's the same thing. Uh, but the real, the real reason for the frog is just, uh, we didn't take ourselves very seriously. Uh, in the beginning. Uh, we were just passionate about solving real pain, helping companies and developers achieve their goal. Uh, and, uh, since it was just, uh, a very cute animal that you can play around in terms of marketing and, uh, it draws attention, uh, and also sends a message of more lightness and being developer oriented. That's the origin of that. Uh, we've probably done a good job. I remember at one of the conferences, somebody approached me and, uh, said, what's your name? Jay Frog. That's the most horrible name I ever heard. But one thing for sure, I will not forget it. So, uh, we probably done something right there.

Speaker C: It is very memorable, and I'm glad you went with frog. J Kangaroo doesn't have the same ring to it.

Speaker B: J Kangaroo. They'd be like, what's in the pocket? Um, okay, so all of the software

Speaker C: artifacts, that's what's in the pocket.

Speaker B: That's what would be in there. Okay. So, Yoav, what was the first truly difficult moment where you thought, oh, my gosh, this whole thing may not work?

Speaker D: Well, there were plenty of moments like that in the beginning. It was, first of all, since JFrog, uh, is about infrastructure, at the end of the day, we are the powerhouse that, uh, hosts all the software packages and all the components that make up, uh, the release of every software company. Uh, it's something that just sits there, uh, at least initially. Today it's a little bit different. But Artifacto itself is an infrastructure that, uh, hosts your most important and precious data, but it sits there in the background pretty much like your circuit board in the house. You don't know and you're not aware of its existence until something is broken. And it was very hard. I think it's a journey that every infrastructure company has to, uh, go through. It's very hard to convince investors in the value that you bring. And the only way to actually convince them, at least to get to the A round, is, is, uh, bringing, uh, the proof in terms of customers that adopted you. So until we didn't have that, it was very, very hard to raise the first round. Ah, I never thought, to be honest, I never thought it would not work. I was very convicted about the fact that we are solving a true pain. Uh, but, yeah, getting the first round was difficult. Until we got the first believer.

Speaker C: Yeah, I can understand that. Um, and maybe you've already answered this next question based on the story you just told us, but, uh, if you could go back to JFrog in year one, um, anything specifically that surprised you, outside of kind of the challenges with getting funding, I think I was surprised

Speaker D: by how real the pain is. Uh, I mean, it was just the beginning of this revolution of software being modular, um, and open source getting traction. It was like early days, even before GitHub existed. Um, but, um, yeah, I was surprised by the mass adoption. I think, uh, it was evident that, uh, quality in software, uh, being able to solve it at scale for large enterprises, uh, later on also being universal, which was not the case in the beginning. This is out of the pivoting points where we made Jeffrog. We started with one ecosystem. Today we support over, uh, I think we are around 40 ecosystems of, uh, software packages that we support. This was a, uh, surprising moment in the flow sale.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: You mentioned the challenges of, of the A round. How involved were you personally in, in that? I mean, was it. I know at the time there were three founders and um, you know, we imagine this, this, you know, three founders standing in front of a group of investors and pitching an idea. Um, what was it like for, for you personally in that process? What was your role? And, and were you interacting with these potential investors yourself? Quite a bit?

Speaker D: For sure, I was very much involved. All of us were. Uh, it's, uh. When you're that small, I mean, we, we. It was not just us, but when you're that small and uh, uh, you go together to all of the meetings. You, uh, you, you walk on the, on the, on the, on the presentation together. You, uh, analyze each and every meeting. Uh, uh, you're very, very much involved. Involved in predicting the market, putting the business guidelines, uh, around the product. Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: Were you guys together when you, when you got approval on your first investment, when the A round came in?

Speaker D: Yes, of course.

Speaker B: And what happened? Did you guys like, high five and celebrate immensely or just get right back to work?

Speaker D: Yeah, so we got the first A round from Gemini. Uh, it was uh, three and a half million back then in 2012. It's like a ridiculous amount of money that, uh, probably what is, uh, uh, a low seed today. Uh, yeah, but it was a changing moment because, uh, once you get, uh, the first believer in you, uh, it opens up the door not just in terms of funding, uh, but also in terms of, uh, other investors are willing to look at you. They're looking at you at a different angle because um, they fancy the capital, they don't so much fancy the venture and uh, the risk seemed uh, more manageable for them.

Speaker C: Mhm. Yeah. So as you can imagine Yoav, we have a lot of aspiring founders who listen to this podcast to hear about established founders journey like yours. Um, what's one thing that you think first time founders consistently underestimate? And we realize that's a pretty loaded question because it's probably multiple things that first time founders underestimate. But if you had to kind of pick one, what, what would it be?

Speaker D: If uh, if I had to pick only one, it's uh, no doubt choosing the right partners, uh, making sure that you have balance. I mean we are three founders. Uh, it's not that we constantly agree on things. Well sometimes on the opposite we argue about everything and uh, not everything, but we argue a lot and it creates a very healthy balance because we see the world differently. Not just in terms of business versus technical, but yeah, this uh, um, exchange of ideas, conflicting views, it creates power, not uh, the opposite. It's really important. And uh, as long as you are in it together, this is uh, critical.

Speaker C: I love that perspective. That conflict and a difference in opinion is actually a good thing. When you're building a business.

Speaker D: I think you'll become complacent if you choose people who are exactly like you. Yes, it kind of does a bad service a disservice to the company at

Speaker C: the end of the day for sure. Well, speaking of uh, differing opinions, as I'm sure you're reading all of the headlines that we're all reading and quite frankly you're at the very center of this topic. There's a perspective out there that the reemergence of AI is ultimately going to be the end of, you know, software engineers or software engineering as we know it today. Um, how, if you could speak to how AI is changing the software landscape from your perspective and how is JFROG playing a part in all of this?

Speaker D: So it changed the way that you're operating software, um, and it kind of made source irrelevant. People thought this will take time and it will come in, uh, just in a few years. But uh, it's already effect when people are writing software that are less and less looking at the source code to a level that it becomes almost an intermediate representation of your intent. So you go from your intent. There is a source that's being generated, it's being looked at less and less. And also more people are becoming developers, uh, um, and they don't need to look at the source if they know to express their intent, uh, in the way that, in a way that AI understands, uh, they can create software and good software and therefore they are creating binaries directly. And also the speed of creating software grew in uh, uh, it's growing already in an exponential uh, scale. So we are facing a tsunami of binaries. We are creating more source that gets translated to more binaries, more releases. And jfog is the system of record that manages those releases, the new AI assets that uh, are part of these releases, the provenance that tells you as a software uh, vendor what your release is comprised of. So basically it contributed a lot to the growth of jfhog because uh, this uh, uh, growth in binaries, this growth in releases, they need to bring trust to them, uh, is the reality today. Now when we think about AI, AI is very good at generation, it has the iq, but it's really, really bad at governance. If you take uh, these characteristics, um, it actually creates a risk that needs to be managed. Because if you don't control how AI pushes things to say, these are ready for production, if you don't make sure that uh, your rules uh, are being uh, respected when you're creating software, if you don't make sure that you don't allow things to go to production, ah, unless it's in the right quality, unless it's in the right uh, time of the day or the year. These are very common policies within enterprises what can be deployed. Well if you just let AI uh do its thing, uh, it's multiplying the risk and Jeff Hogg is, is reducing this risk. It's bringing trust and it's channeling the agents, channeling the AI for the same governance, uh, pipelines that uh, software needs to go through. So it creates a dual growth both in the volume of just more binaries, more software to manage and more need to manage risk.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean in other words it's AI isn't slowing down software, it's actually doing quite the opposite. It's democratizing software development which is creating a bigger need for JFrog than ever before.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's democratizing but it's also increasing speed dramatically. Uh, and you know, whenever in the beginning it was all about speed. I'm m talking about uh, the early um, 2010 and so on. The J slogan in the beginning was release fast or die. It was just speed is the most crucial thing to stay in business today. We know that speed without trust, speed without balances, without governance, is worth nothing. So if you wish to drive fast you have to have the seat belts, you have to have um, the security mechanisms to make sure that you don't uh, change lanes when there's another car coming your way. So this is exactly what JFHO brings to the world of software. We are allowing companies to uh, drive in maximum speed while maintaining trust and quality in those software. And Jeffhog today is serving the majority of the Fortune 100, uh, more than 80%, sometimes 100% of the Fortune 10 depending on the sector. So we have this uh, with great power comes great responsibility. Serving the largest organization on the planet today. And uh, this is where uh, with AI, this is where we bring essential value to those customers.

Speaker C: Is the tagline going to be updated to release fast, safely or die. Perhaps that one word.

Speaker D: Today we.

Speaker C: Is that.

Speaker D: Not exactly. Today we are calling everything, we're calling all these uh, liquidity software. It was uh, this vision of having software just imagine that the zero friction because you have full trust. So software is flowing like liquid all the way to production continuously. Uh, so this is uh, what we're trying to do. And with AI it's actually the reality because people are releasing and uh, firing up multiple agents and creating new versions of software so quickly that uh, it's impossible to track. So unless you have this built in automation, this built security, this buil in governance, uh, it's impossible to trust the outcome. Yeah, well said.

Speaker B: You have to forgive us. We're, we're uh, we're marketers so we're, we're naturally thinking of, of updated taglines. I think that was a good one. I also like yours quite a bit too. Yoav, you just, you just went into the, the, an amazing value prop that J. Frog has. Um, but let's talk about your, your, your competition. Um, how do you differentiate yourself, uh, from your competitors in the marketplace?

Speaker D: A couple of things. First of all, J is a platform rather than a point solution. There uh, are many point solutions, for example in the, in the security space, but uh, they need to be integrated. The other and maybe most major thing is that being a system of fake code. A system of fake code not just for your releases, but for everything that your releases are comprised of. So all the ingredients, if you wish of your releases, all the third party open source or internal uh, components that at the end of the day will create a release. This is something that is being kept in one single secure place and that allows you also to apply governance and controls in a single place. Uh, so this is uh, A second uh factor. Uh there are more uh subtle things like uh uh when they are major but maybe they are uh uh less evident. The thing that we are universal. We are supporting uh um many many package types, many many ecosystems and we keep adding support uh now with AI we are supporting uh AI models and skills and mcps and since we have the underlying infrastructure to add this support uh uh in a very flexible and fast way uh then we are getting faster to market than ah all our competitors. Uh scalability uh is another issue. Since we are for many years serving the largest uh companies in the world today, uh we had to build the scalability, the geographic distribution that these companies are expecting uh into the products. That takes a lot of time to mature. And finally we are hybrid so we will serve you whether you are uh in the cloud or need on premise installation. If you're more uh security uh company or maybe you have uh geographic uh or political limitations and we allow you to mix and match uh those two in the same platform is having both cloud and on premise. In the cloud we are serving the JFOO platform on all three uh uh all the major cloud vendors. Uh so this combination of a single platform, single source of trust uh for an organization with these functional um uh advantages is where we are ahead of the competition.

Speaker C: Uh that those are, that's an impressive, impressive platform all the way around. Thank you iwab. So if we get back to the kind of the founder journey and the J. Frog journey itself, what are you most proud of?

Speaker D: I think that the most for me the most important thing is uh being being able to serve humanity. I mean we are allowing companies to create software um that is uh, that is trusted. We protect our customers from nefarious players. Uh especially with the advent of uh crypto in the mid or early uh 2010 uh there's a new trend of uh attacking the supply chain because uh it's easier to create, uh, it's more lucrative. I mean the scale of attacking the supply chain uh is just immensely more rewarding than just attacking a single vendor. If you take for instance the airbag example I gave in the beginning. If uh say that you want to put a tracking device you can put it in the car manufacturer's uh facility. But if you manage to penetrate the airbag manufacturing facility and put it in the airbag then you distribute your malicious uh, in malicious device to many more uh companies because this herbal company sells to maybe 80 uh car vendors. So it's the same. I mean once you get into the supply chain that is being consumed by, uh, other vendors. Uh, you harvest, uh, a lot more. You can harvest a lot more, you can impact a lot more, ah, targets. Um, and yeah, so protecting our customers from that, uh, is a huge, huge, uh, value to that.

Speaker B: Bettering humanity is, is something to be proud of for sure.

Speaker C: For sure.

Speaker B: So that's great. Uh, Yoav.

Speaker A: Hey.

Speaker B: So we're going to round things out here and wrap up and just wanted to ask you in closing if you have any advice, uh, for anyone who's thinking about founding a company.

Speaker D: Yeah. So, uh, focusing. Just focus on a pain and solve it really, really, really, really well. Uh, we have what we call a codex in Jeff Hook. That's our values. We have, uh, like, uh, a bunch of, uh, values that we formalized over the years that many of them came from, uh, the employees themselves. Uh, one of the main values that, uh, were, uh, very guiding for us in the beginning was, uh, first of all, was every detail counts. This is about solving things, uh, really, really well. And the other one was think, uh, big. Just act bigger than you really are because it's going to get you, though if you think about yourself as a. As small. And yeah, when I, when I'll get the first big customer, then I'll act. I'll change my way to act bigger. It doesn't work that way. You have to, uh, fake it until you make it. So you have to think big from the beginning, otherwise it will not happen.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, we have a similar phrase that we used to have earlier in. In the company, and it was called punching above our weight. Exactly. So, yeah, that's similar. Well, Yoav, thank you so much for spending some time, uh, with us today. I learned quite a bit. Congratulations with the success of J. Frog. I know Trace RE is a big fan of it.

Speaker C: Y. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Congratulations.

Speaker D: Thank you, guys.

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