Jellyfish

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Founders: Andrew Lau, David Gourley, Phil Braden
Founding: 2017
Mission: For every engineering leader to be a business leader
Employees: 200+ & ~50% in Boston area
Workplace: Hybrid (Fully Flexible)
Stage & Capital Raised: Series C & $114.5M
Investors: Accel, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Wing VC, Half Court VC
Key Customers: Jobvite, Acquia, PagerDuty, ZoomInfo, Latch
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Valuation (estimated): $250M – $500M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Q1 ‘23 $70M Series C)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Jellyfish is “Salesforce for Engineering”. An analogy that even the densest of us startup people can understand. They call themselves “The Bloom” which I have to admit is pretty cool. The Jellyfish team has capitalized on the evolving role of engineering leaders and their emerging role as business strategists as software eats the world. Founder Andrew Lau eloquently explains how Jellyfish is building a way to make engineering more measurable in a video on their website’s About Us page.

Many of us have been at companies with their roadmap on a Google spreadsheet that hasn’t been touched in months, amiright? The team is attacking a classic “painkiller” problem by trying to prevent less miscommunication (ahem, yelling) between Sales & Engineering and measure the technical inputs & outputs that drive business results. Who doesn’t want less yelling?? I would love a cultural meter on Glassdoor that measures the amount of organizational yelling over time. Useful metric.

The principles of detection tell me that these gentlemen – Andrew, David & Phil – met at Endeca. I don’t know the Endeca story too deeply yet but something was in the water over there because Endeca fingerprints are ALL over growing Boston startups.

The Jellyfish platform is best suited for 10+ person developer teams. Their software incorporates Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Google Sheets (you know who you are) and more into a collective tool trusted by local organizations like Toast, ZoomInfo, DataRobot, Salsify and other big engineering orgs at companies like Priceline, PagerDuty, Optimizely and many others. They market to Engineering leaders, Product leaders, and more recently Finance Teams.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Evan Klein & Adam Harris from their Product Marketing team this week. Thanks for the time guys! They walked me through a demo and relayed that Jellyfish surpassed their aspirational 2022 growth goals amidst the macroeconomic headwinds and have plans to continue that momentum into 2023.

There is a secret accelerant to know that drives Jellyfish without ever looking at their books. Engineers LOVE measuring things. “How expensive is this meeting?” “Could you help quantify the revenue that building this feature would drive?” And it rubs off! Once you see the world with those goggles you can’t unsee it.  I can’t help but chuckle when imagining their sales team pitching to CTOs, Heads of Product, and VPs of Engineering. I know the first questions those prospects will be asking: “What’s the ROI?” and “how expensive is this to integrate?” The product is priced in a pretty classic B2B SaaS fashion according to the number of engineers in an organization and billed annually. The integration is pretty straightforward too from my understanding.

Now, even Finance teams are joining The Bloom. In October of this past year the team launched DevFinOps for R&D Cost Reporting (deeper explanation here). A relatively complementary product portfolio expansion for the Jellyfish team, it’s already having a huge impact for existing & new customers. DevFinOps does the automated reporting that no Engineer manually wants to do and, in the process, helps Finance organizations transform R&D expenses into capitalized software costs via reporting. When you capitalize expenses you take them off the income statement and move them over to the balance sheet to recognize them over a longer period of time through depreciation. The benefit? Increased profitability in the near term period (quarter, year, etc). Now that’s a product built for a recession if I’ve ever seen one.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers need work so apologies to the Jellyfish team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

More roles likely to be added in the coming weeks as 2023 planning wraps up!

If I was interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are some new product launches, team growth expectations, and revenue growth expectations for the coming year? You’ll want to know their 2023 plans if you plan to join
  • How big is the engineering team – headcount # and % of total company size? If I’m joining a software company focused on engineering teams I would expect it to be technically heavy (30%+)
  • What are the biggest challenges (opportunities) you’re working on this year at the company and team level? I’d ask this question across all interviews. It’s so helpful to see how tight alignment is organizationally when you grow to 200+ person teams
  • How has your planning shifted for 2023 with the broad tightening in tech? Always good to hear what’s top of mind strategically and how market forces affect a business

I’m still embarrassed about walking into my Goldman Sachs analyst interview as a senior in college fully briefed on the firm’s history & Wikipedia page with 0 prep for role related questions or any other useful material that would have helped me land the job. Ah, to be young. Make sure you prepare!

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Jellyfish you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team in the coming years. Onward and upward to the moon they go!

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