William Leonard
After working in enterprise automation across his entire career, Sal Stabler and his co-founder Arman decided to build a startup that drew on their previous experiences from corporate roles at IBM interface in many other companies. Their startup now audit deploy, is a software company that specializes in continuous delivery, and release automation for enterprises, essentially helping fortune 500 solve their software delivery issues. So tune in as Sal talks about the three-year transformation projects where he realized the need for a product tie solution that would ultimately become AuditDeploy. He’ll also talk about how he established a communication workflow in cadence with his co-founder. And also we’ll dive into the network effects of building a startup in Atlanta and much, much more. Sal, it’s great to have you on.
Sal Stabler
Hey, William, it’s great to be here. Thank you.
William Leonard
For sure. You’re the man who knows everything about enterprise, the deployment of automation, and excited to get your thoughts and perspectives on that. But before we dive in, would love to kick it off with what is AuditDeploy? What are you and Armond building here in Atlanta?
Sal Stabler
Great question. AuditDeply, I would like to start that it’s the brainchild of my co-founder because as an engineer he had this constant problem with every enterprise he would go into, they would need some form of software deployment automation platform to be created. They could automatically build, test, and deploy software and get it to a production environment in a very safe way. And through that learning, when he and I finally connected, it was all around if we could embed a piece of software inside a company to give them the same engineering efficiency as Google, Amazon, Netflix, but into a typical enterprise. An enterprise that doesn’t make their livelihood from selling software, but they have other physical services or goods they have to sell. They have strict corporate governance, and usually high pressures of regulatory compliance, and we try to make their lives tremendously easier without disrupting their current operations or business model. AuditDeploy is all about how do we streamline the software development delivery process as simple, as secure, and as fast as possible for these organizations?
William Leonard
Got it. We’re gonna dive into what that practically means a bit more in a second, but what is your background? What’s the Sal Stabler story of how you made this leap into doing the crazy thing and building a startup as one of our general partners, Gary Peat, would say?
Sal Stabler
It’s interesting because I have a unique background, I would say. I started working at Dell computers right out of high school. I had worked there for about a little over a year and quickly went on to college over in Florida. I’m originally from Panama. I moved from Panama to Florida after Dell to continue my education but I had the entrepreneurial bug early on in high school but didn’t do much with it. When I got to college, I had so many ideas that I had to do them right away. I was going to school and at the same time, starting several ventures. I started out with waste removal, getting your valet trash picked up at your door at apartment complexes in Gainesville, Florida, and grew it to 700 units. From there, started a little SaaS company called Quixli where we would automate the process of getting a domain and web hosting for professional services, accountants, and financial services. And then from there, did digital marketing, consulting, and website development. I had this college and entrepreneurial burning simultaneously. I grabbed all that learning and decided I really love software and really loved making software. I’m gonna go work in the software business after college and get jobs at startups and SMBs. Eventually got all the way to IBM and did very large-scale marketing automation there. Automation is a consistent part of my story. I’ve always been brought in to be a change agent, drive digital transformation, apply all my learnings from my entrepreneurial background then build that over the startup career and bring streamline and a very systematic approach to how do you develop the product? How do you drive growth using tools? How do you get it out to market very, very quickly? That’s where my career started out.
William Leonard
Awesome. As you said, automation was the common theme in all of your entrepreneurial endeavors before AuditDeploy, and what was the spark that led you to say, “Hey, there’s a need here in the market for this solution and AuditDeploy can potentially build for enterprises and customers.”
Sal Stabler
I think the common between my Co-founder and I is he had built platforms for deploying software, I had built automation platforms for deploying not only products but with embedded growth mechanisms to drive user adoption and get them in the door to sign up for these products. That was more of the marketing side of it. The user experience side of this and the spark for this is when I left IBM, I started working in a manufacturing company, a Fortune 600 manufacturing company. My job was to report to the VP ofIT and the CIO and come up with a three-year digital transformation strategy. It very quickly became clear to me that where I was sitting between the intersection of the CMO and the CIO, where they’re trying to streamline that customer digital experience end to end, it became very clear that IT operations or the legacy technology infrastructure they had, was not going to really enable the business to move as quickly as they wanted with some of the software projects that they were they were going after. That’s where my co-founder and I met. I actually had to hire Armond to come into the organization I was working on through a referral. I was told this guy’s the best guy in the industry in DevOps in automating that Developer to Operation process. We got to work and the spark very quickly became that I realized that our mind had over a decade of all these, he had solved this problem so many times. He had built code that when I looked at his source code, I said, “Hey, I think there’s a product here. I think when we leave here after this big project we were working on we should go start a company.” Fast forward from 2019, January to around November, we were meeting back up, whiteboarding and talking about what is this thing we’re calling and he came to me he’s like, “Hey, I want to call it AuditDeploy because we audit your software and deploy it very safe to a production environment.” And I said, “Great, we’ll call it AuditDeploy.” We just ran off with the idea but it was a lot of meetings, whiteboarding, and figuring out how do we get this into an enterprise in a consumable way because a lot of solutions in the market that we could see were it was very complex and very developer-focused, not really had a business kind of focus to it for someone who’s like a scrum master or release manager who’s in charge of all the orchestration and coordination of getting that piece of software out to market involves a tremendous amount of coordination to do. We felt we could solve that problem with the software.
William Leonard
You were tasked with a three-year transformation project, you realize that this may take a bit more than three years, and the legacy systems would really hinder how you all could execute on this project. Let’s take a step back here and kind of break down the industry a bit. I may perhaps frame it in this way, where do the inefficiencies exist in projects like this? What is the entire process of AuditDeploy’s software? Who are the stakeholders involved in this transformation automation equation as well?
Sal Stabler
Let me take a step back to it and give you an idea from my perspective and what I’ve seen repeatedly in many organizations. You have to imagine that if you’re a developer or just have the capacity to build software, you’re potentially in a large company, you’re this is what we call the frustrated innovators, right? They have an idea, they see something that can improve, but they don’t really feel empowered and enabled to do so. Imagine, in today’s world, a developer can make a game. He can literally send you a link, you could play right away, no big deal. Pretty remarkable. Send you a link, click on my app, look how it works, you get an output, you see the result, and you’re excited. Doing that kind of thing in the enterprise, imagine you’ve come up with a new data or information-based solution that solves whether that’s cancer or improves heart surgeries or any of those things. That developer would have to re-architect the messy legacy technology infrastructure that exists in that industry to get it to work with the application he’s just created. This similar challenge exists pretty much in finance, government, utility logistics, healthcare, and pharma, this exists all across some of the most important industries. I would say where we come and figured out is, how do we grab a data-driven approach? This means how do we grab a careful approach, we’re doing an x-ray of all the current processes and workflows that they have in place to try to streamline that bill to test to deploy that piece of software. This is like a package, a huge number of changes that are coming into the production environment, and there’s literally no visibility of what is that going to bring down a server? Is that going to create mishaps for the end-users? You have to imagine the best example I could give is no different than the Amazon example, where can you imagine you ordered something, and they gave you no tracking of where it was, and if all of a sudden it went missing, you had no tracking capacity of it, you start to freak out, you start to be like, “Okay, who do I call? Why is it missing?” Do you know what went wrong? Today, we take it for granted that we only go check for something missing the minute it’s missing, you know what I mean? You expect the package to just show up at your house and if it does go missing, you can open up your phone, you can track directly where it is, how many days it’s going to get to you, and even what parcel is a part of. That’s what we’re trying to bring to the space. A more data-centric, systematic approach to doing software delivery, getting that software, whether it’s to an internal customer within the business, or that’s to get a product out to an external customer.
William Leonard
It makes sense. I think the Amazon example really hammers at the home of how visibility is so important in this entire process. And as you said, you never really realize something is missing until it’s missing. You have to go looking for it. That makes a lot of sense. Practically, would you say that large enterprises maybe Fortune 1000s, or Fortune 500s are dealing with this problem the most in the current modern world?
Sal Stabler
It’s the biggest problem right now because there’s an existential threat for them, where if they don’t master data, software, and their ability to get technology-enabled products and services out to market as fast as they can in a safe way and in a way that their customers trust them, then they’re basically vulnerable to being disrupted. We’re seeing this everywhere, the cloud has made it very easy for startups to spin up. But often, most of the infrastructure and technology these companies managed are kind of in a hybrid, some in the data center, a lot of it’s in the data center, by the way, some of it’s in the cloud, and some of it might be in some kind of virtual private cloud. For our system, we designed it from the ground up with the ability to run in any environment. There was a world where there was either one cloud or maybe a few data centers where companies would run their applications. But in this new world we live in, it’s a sky full of clouds. I mean, there are so many options to go by, where do I run this? Even if they find the target, where they want to run it, the biggest issue is a lot of the data that they need to power, that application is usually behind a firewall in an on-prem system which runs into all sorts of issues; GDPR, personal identifiable information, data privacy, and orchestrating. You had asked earlier about where all the people are involved? At the pinnacle, you have someone in charge of a technical delivery initiative, which is a VP of Application or VP of Engineering, and the DevOps students are in charge of creating the assembly line or the glue that makes all the sequences happen and uniformity as best they can. Right now, they’re trying to glue open-source tooling that a developer might have brought into the organization might not know about, and they’re trying to hack, basically, the automation without really understanding or having visibility on what’s the impact if something goes wrong. Right now, the best way the industry is solving this problem is throwing as many bodies as they can at it, who have pretty much a lot of experience in trying to glue this together but there’s no standard, no different than a seatbelt standard or a high-quality assurance standard in the automotive space. For software delivered, there’s no agreed-upon way we should be introducing software into these different environments. For that reason, you get a lot of bespoke custom duct-taping right in that middle layer and it’s incredibly hard to figure out why something went down. Why is this e-commerce site down or why is that platform down? The troubleshooting component becomes incredibly difficult and it could take hours and months, which equates to lost revenue and lost customers, right?
William Leonard
That sounds like equally with the process being kind of discombobulated. There are equally a plethora of vulnerabilities. As these enterprises move to cloud-native applications nowadays, I want to transition the conversation here a bit, too. You met Armond during your time at IBM and that’s a unique case, but for some of our other listeners who are maybe at a corporate enterprise job right now and thinking of making that leap to entrepreneurship and starting a venture, what are some of the things that they should be looking for in a co-founder as they are standing out the market for someone technical, or someone technical with an idea sounding out the market for someone to run the business and have the business savvy?
Sal Stabler
That’s a great question. I met Armond right after IBM at this enterprise. I would say it’s one of these things where oftentimes, we’ve kind of gone off on our own. We have a lot of ideas, we start experimenting, we start thinking of what to build, what problems that could solve for someone, and for me, I was very lucky stars aligned and you’ve met your other half. You almost are on the same page, you have the same level of curiosity intensity. I would say it’s really about focusing on the problem that you’re really interested in or passionate about. For us, it was really about how do we accelerate digital transformation in these big companies and our meeting point came due to a need for me to play the role of a product owner when I was at this manufacturing company and then having my other half who happens to be a tremendously talented automation engineer, essentially, just kind of through that interaction is we had this bonding moment. I know some people who start off and they have an idea and they want to get started. For me, it became a patient approach of really wanting to dive deep and learn as much as I could about the software industry and the business, and then trying to find what problems I really want to tackle with what I know. I think that leads you to hopefully finding someone else that has a tremendous amount of passion, because, for us, it’s all about being mission-driven. We’re not mercenaries. Some companies want to flip a startup and make a lot of money and there’s nothing wrong with that. For us, we’re very mission-driven guys and through that energy, we want to build a great product that makes a difference for these companies and these people, right?
William Leonard
I love that approach that you all are taking. At this early stage of startup life, it’s important to kind of build a workflow and a cadence around communication with your founder. I’m curious, do you have any insight as to how someone can apply and maybe even a templated approach to building out communication cadence, a workflow cadence with a co-founder, at an early point of the business?
Sal Stabler
I would say depending on the complexities of the type of business that you have. For us, being an enterprise software startup, the market is incredibly confusing and complex in many ways. There’s a lot of emerging, and diverging, and the lines are blending in so many areas that Armond and I meet every single day at 8:30 in the morning. Except we protect our Saturdays and Sundays to be with our families. But Monday through Friday, without a miss, 8:30 every day is our religious path. I would recommend that to any founder if they can do that early on. It’s great. It has so many benefits whether you’re pitching to a customer, or you’re pitching to an investor, or recruiting new people. I think the organization wants to be that the founders are in synced and are on the same page and there are no conflicting or opposing ideas about the vision and mission of the company. That only becomes clearer as you have this everyday meeting. I would highly recommend meeting every day and always having an agenda for each one of those meetings. It’s been probably the best thing we’ve done from day one.
William Leonard
Building chemistry in cohesion, especially as you’re speaking with customers and investors, it’s very important to be on one accord as a team. You’ve been building AuditDeploy since 2020, what gets you most excited about 2022 and the vision for the business that you and Armond have developed? Can you share some high-level insight as to what you’re most looking forward to this year?
Sal Stabler
What we’re really excited about is we’re getting the organic demand for what we’re doing through our partners referring more use cases. The problem we solve is massive and complex at the same time. What we’re excited about this year is really bringing our first offering to market which is what we call basically, our DevOps X-ray or software delivery lifecycle diagnostic tool. This is a really good first step because the problem the enterprise is seeing is basically, “Great. I have a lot of data and a lot of tools, how does that help me know how to do the automation?” That’s really what they keep asking us. We’re bringing a data-driven and insights approach to showing them how to do the automation in a very safe way. That worksite says it’s a very first good step for them. Believe it or not, not everyone has a DevOps process implemented into their organization. Most recently, one of our new clients is just starting out their $250 million medical supply company and their direct ground level. Our thesis is we think we can grab a company from a low performing on how to do development deployments to an elite level where they’re doing several deployments of productions every day, on-demand in about three to six months. That would be massively impactful for the organization to have that level of capability. With this tool, we believe we can get them there very, fairly quickly this year. That’s what excites us this year. Bringing this data tool to market and providing as many use cases and beta tests with clients and working in that really tight feedback loop because everyone in the organization is unique. For us, it’s really can we map the deployment to the production process by gathering this data and then being able to come back with evidence base or facts based on this is the suggestion recommendation, the tool suggesting you should take when you’re doing the automation.
William Leonard
Got it. I love that. It sounds like a great first step that will be taking place this year. Excited about that launch. You were born in Panama and you said you moved to Florida, and it seems like you spent a great majority of your working career here in Atlanta. We’re happy that you chose Atlanta to launch AuditDeploy and curious to hear about your thoughts on the city of Atlanta and maybe some of the network effects that you have recognized from building an early-stage software company with enterprise customers here in the city of Atlanta.
Sal Stabler
First of all, there’s a lot of innovation in the Atlanta market. Atlanta has been a blessing to us. When I was first looking at where to land, there were a lot of options, and coming to Atlanta, I had moved with a startup and they had relocated me from Gainesville, Florida to the Atlanta office. I was working in the West Midtown in a little startup studio there. Just the energy, the excitement, that easy access to people, I think it has pretty much everything that you possibly can need to start a company. If you’re in the enterprise space, you have 20 of the Fortune 500 headquarters right here in your backyard. I mean it’s like a dream come true with us launching an enterprise software company here in Atlanta. It has a lot of the clients we want to talk to, get to know, and understand our issues. I think Atlanta, it’s interesting. I thought then it was an early beginning. I think right now, it’s really taking off. There’s a lot of mentorship going on in Atlanta and I think the funding aspect, it’s starting to ramp up there. I would love to see it pick up some more. But when I first got here, there were a lot of services-based companies and now you’re starting to see a lot more product-led software companies come into the area. That’s kind of what we are. We’re a software product company. It’s exciting. I think there are a lot of great tools and resources just right here in Atlanta. That’s great.
William Leonard
Awesome. Glad they relocated you here. You saw the vision of the city a decade ago. Now, I think the city is at a healthy spot in terms of the tech ecosystem that is taking shape here, the venture scene that is also taking shape, and then just the early startup scene is just booming here. We’re attracting companies from New York, the Bay, and even internationally, as well. I think the city of Atlanta is only going to continue to develop in that fashion as well. I’m incredibly thankful that you were able to join me today and really talk about some of the ins and outs of AuditDeploy, the vision of the company, the origins of the business, and even give us some insight into founder and co-founder relationships as well, which is so important. I’m excited about this episode coming out. I think our listeners will extract a lot of value from your insights and hopefully, one of those potential customers is listening and they can reach out to you. What is the best way to get in touch with you or Armond to learn more about AuditDeploy?
Sal Stabler
You can go to https://www.auditdeploy.com/ as a great first step and if you want to email me directly at sal@auditdeploy.com, also a great way you can reach out to me. I have a pretty personal connection to our clients and our partners. That would be a great first step. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m pretty easily accessible on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably my best, most successful place to get me so feel free to reach out.
William Leonard
Awesome. Sal, it was a pleasure having you today. Appreciate your time and look forward to seeing all that you do here in Atlanta.
Sal Stabler
Hey, thank you so much for having us. This was great.
Lisa
We’re thrilled to have you as an Atlanta Startup Podcast listener to help you get the most out of the experience. Let me invite you to three insider opportunities from our host Valor Ventures. First, want to be a guest on this amazing show. Reach out to our booking team at atlantastartuppodcast.com. Click on booking, It’s a no-brainer from there. Are you raising a seed round? Valor definitely wants to hear from you. Share your startup story at valor.vc/pitch. Are you a woman or minority-led startup valor sister program? The Startup Runway Foundation gives away grants to promising startups led by underrepresented founders. The mission of the Startup Runway Foundation is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investors. Startup runway finalists have raised over $40 million. See if you qualify for one of these amazing grants at startuprunway.org. You can also sign up for our next showcase for free there. Let me let you go today with a shout-out to Startup Runway presenting sponsor Cox Enterprises and to our founding partners, American Family Institute, Truist, Georgia Power, Avanta Ventures, and Innovators Legal. These great organizations make Startup Runway possible. Thanks for listening today and see you back next week.
