Daytona grew 50% a month for 18 months without any salespeople | Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona

Krishan (0:07)

Hello, everyone, my name is Krishan, welcome back to TNW. Today, our guest is Ivan, the co-founder and CEO at Daytona. Hi, Ivan, please tell us more about yourself.

Ivan Burazin (0:17)

Hi, thanks for having me. Basically, one of the co-founders of a infrastructure company called Daytona, and we help with enabling agents to, I like to say, go to school and go to work, in the sense of we help them, well, we help companies with the post-training of AI agents, hence the school, and we also help serve agent companies, app layer agent companies, so agents that have to go and do things on behalf of humans.

Krishan (0:46)

Okay. For anybody that doesn't know yet about yourself, can you tell us more about your background and how you started the company?

Ivan Burazin (0:54)

Sure. I mean, I co-founded Daytona with my two co-founders. One of them, I've been co-founding together for probably almost 20 years. The other one, a little bit less, but a long time still. And so we've always run up and down the infrastructure stack, always serving developers, now agents. But generally, we started racking servers a long time ago, created the very first cloud IDE.

Then we had an events business quite similar to this, but focused on developers. Then had a stint in communication platform infrastructure. And lastly, Daytona.

Krishan (1:28)

Amazing. I was at one of your events recently, and the first thing I think about when I heard the name was something else. So please tell us the origin of the name and how it connects to the company.

Ivan Burazin (1:40)

So, yeah, just the inspiration was as...

was we... the original version of Daytona automated the development environment of humans. Yeah. And so what we wanted to...

in software development, you have essentially the inner and outer loop of software development. And what we tried to do is create the same infrastructure, both for the inner and outer loop. And so the idea was kind of you had one single loop. And when you think of one loop, you think of one loop, you know where I'm going with this. As a kid, I played a lot of Daytona 500 And so the Daytona racetrack is a loop. And so that was inspiration for the name, yeah.

Krishan (2:17)

That's amazing. What is the number one reason that customers need Daytona?

Ivan Burazin (2:23)

So, I mean, we have two, again, two major use cases, which are long running or background agents and post training. So those are two major types. And so on the post training side, we have some foundational model companies like Meta, Cohere that use us and some others, data labeling companies or data companies, I should say. So the likes of Handshake and Macor and what others will use us as well to help. And basically the reason is that the not only are they ergonomic, so the way you consume a Daytona much easier on the people using it versus legacy hyperscaler, but also the performance.

We compare ourselves quite often to Kubernetes, nothing that Kubernetes for the people that are not technical.

So it is a service that helps you scale up multiple machines, pods, VMs. And it is used for app deployment, but it is not specifically made for this use case. And the vast majority of people when they start doing either post training or background agents at scale, that is what they use. But Daytona is essentially at least 36% faster than this, meaning not only do you get more time to do more runs, but also your GPUs, which is a very finite resource today, is free that much more of the time. So because of everything from the ergonomics, the ease of use, the performance, and the cost at the end, people do use that versus legacy infrastructures.

Krishan (3:52)

Tell us more about the company. How do you go from three co-founders in Croatia, founding one of the hottest startups in Europe? And how do you get to win such big customers, and get their trust, and deliver, and become a leader?

Ivan Burazin (4:08)

I mean, you go to San Francisco. I mean, I've been living on an airplane for the last two years almost, so back on two continents twice a month, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Krishan (4:20)

Probably more than 50, 100 flights a year.

Ivan Burazin (4:23)

Way more, way more, way more, way more. Yeah, so a lot, a lot. And so be there. We were very, because of our experience in doing events, our go-to-market strategy was very much in real life.

Krishan (4:34)

In person, yeah.

Ivan Burazin (4:35)