Evolving from Dev to CEO with Stephen Magill of Muse.dev

**Dan Lines** (0:03)
The most prolific companies in the world today are led by former developers. And that's why I'm so excited about this week's episode of Dev Interrupted.
I've brought in Stephen Magill, former research developer and recently turned CEO of Muse.dev to talk about what it means to go from developer to business leader.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
This episode is sponsored by Linear B. Give your dev team the power to improve with team based metrics, high risk code alerts and the world's first project board based on real time get activity.
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**Dan Lines** (0:38)
Stephen, thanks for joining me today on Dev Interrupted.

**Stephen Magill** (0:41)
Thank you, happy to be here.

**Dan Lines** (0:43)
Yeah, awesome to have you here. So getting into our topic of discussion, what we've kind of seen now is businesses have seen like a shift in company leadership, maybe over the last 20 years, more and more companies are seeing former devs be the CEO of the companies. So why do you think more companies today are being led by former developers as opposed to traditional like salespeople?

**Stephen Magill** (1:16)
Yeah, I don't know, it's interesting. I mean, it certainly all starts with product, right? And so I think it makes sense to have the first person in a leadership role, the first CEO, be from that technical background.
It provides a lot of advantages in assisting with product management, but also there's a certain element of trust I find, right? Like when most of your organization is developers, they kind of are more willing to take the suggestions of a developer leader on faith, right? There's less convincing that you have to do, which just makes the process work smoothly. And then obviously things shift over time, right? Sales becomes more important, marketing becomes more important things, things shift and other expertise is important to bring in.

**Dan Lines** (2:06)
Yeah, I mean, early on, it probably helps to have a lot of clout with the engineering team. Like we're building a product, maybe we're a product growth company, a lot of the times, gaining a lot of users early on, if you're kind of that PLG style company is almost more important than revenue. And we've seen a lot of companies get millions of users, billions of users, then the revenue comes later.
Kind of like with that product first approach, and I don't know if that's what you're doing for your company, but do you think that trend will continue?

**Stephen Magill** (2:46)
Yeah, I think so.
Especially with software as a service and everything sort of going into the service oriented architecture, it's much easier now for people to try things out, right? And people expect to be able to try things out and then make a purchase decision. And so it really supports that user growth first model.

**Dan Lines** (3:10)
Yeah, it's pretty much the same for me. Like I don't want to talk to a salesperson really early on. Give me the product. Is this product amazing? If it's amazing, I'm in. If it's not amazing, maybe I'm moving on.
So, you know, that all makes sense. I wanted to talk some about the pros and cons of being a developer and a business leader going from dev to business leader. For instance, you know, my product Linear B, the product that my company creates, you know, we're selling directly to business leaders and we have developers as our users. So, you know, for me being a former developer, it kind of gives me an edge. I can speak the same language as our users. You know, to be honest, it's kind of easier to come up with the next innovative thing to do in the product because you're kind of from that culture.
What are some of the advantages or disadvantages you've seen being a developer and then now, you know, a business leader?

**Stephen Magill** (4:19)
Yeah, so first of all, it's definitely the same way for me. You know, our product is very developer focused and we view developers as our core users. And so, you know, it helps to be able, you kind of have to be able to explain what a null pointer exception is and know what a threat safety error is to show sort of the impact of the product and the value. I think, you know, in general, even in those cases where developers aren't your end users, one of the advantages of coming from a technical background, from a developer background, I think people with that background tend to be very logical in how they approach things. They tend to, you know, do research. They don't shy away from going deep, doing research, you know, figuring out all the options.