Holidays, Entrepreneurship and SLOs with Nobl9

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
Hey everyone, Dan Lines here. I hope everyone has been having a wonderful holiday season. Today's episode marks the end of season one of the Dev Interrupted Podcast. I wanna give a heartfelt thank you to all of you who have supported us and continued on this journey with us. We owe a big debt of gratitude to our listeners, and I want you to know that hosting this podcast is one of the reasons that I look forward to going to work every day. We are incredibly excited to continue bringing you more Dev Interrupted episodes in 2022
Have a wonderful new year. We'll return on January 8th with a huge episode.
So far, our season two lineup is packed with talented guests. We really can't wait for it to happen. I look forward to welcoming you back on January 8th. Without further ado, allow me to introduce my executive producer, Conor Bronsdon, who will be guest hosting this week.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:58)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB.
Accelerate your development pipeline with data-driven engineering metrics, continuous improvement automation, and project visibility while cutting your software development cycle time in half. Sign up for your free demo at linearb.io and mention the Dev Interrupted Podcast discount for one month free when you sign up for an annual Pro membership. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is Conor Bronsdon, Dev Interrupted podcast producer and occasional guest host. I'm filling in for Dan Lines this week.
You may remember me from my previous guest appearances as a host, episode 48, featuring Henrik Gudel and his discussion on developer velocity, and episode 50, talking engineering leadership screw-ups, featuring our speakers from Interact. But today, I am going to be interviewing Brian Singer, the CPO at Nobl9. Brian, welcome aboard.

**Brian Singer** (1:45)
Hey, Conor. It's great to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:47)
And congrats, by the way, $21 million Series B funding round earlier this year. It seems like everything's going extremely well at Nobl9.

**Brian Singer** (1:55)
Oh, thank you. That was really exciting for us. Although given where some of the fundraising has gone in the industry, it's like, I think almost like a seed round these days. So it's a little wild.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:05)
I completely agree with you. LinearB raised $16 million back in March, and we were ecstatic at the time and still very happy with it, obviously. But I talked to Dan and Ori Karin, his co-founder on an upcoming episode. And one thing they said is the money is just flowing right now.

**Brian Singer** (2:18)
I think part of it is there's just so many companies investing in software and turning themselves into software companies, so many great innovations and ideas out there that it's just a great time to be building software in general.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:30)
We had Contrast Security on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, and their leadership, I think it was Jeff Williams, said this. He said, you know, software is what's enabling the most successful companies today, right? Every company is turning themselves into technology company, just like you're saying. And that's what really is making the leaders in every industry thrive. So I think you're on point with that for sure.

**Brian Singer** (2:49)
And I think people are realizing, like, you know, C-level executives are realizing that their ability to build software and be successful and, you know, productization of ideas and whatnot is core to their business. I saw the other day that I think it was Chrysler said, we're going to make most of our money on software going forward, most of our margin, and they're going to go from a thousand developers today to 4,500 in the next two years.
That's like every company is going through that transformation, if they haven't already.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:16)
Absolutely. I think that's a huge example, and I wouldn't have expected that. I do want to jump in and give our audience an opportunity to get to know you a little better. I'm curious. I saw you got your degree in computer engineering. You worked as an engineer for several years, and then you went back to school to get an MBA in marketing and entrepreneurship from MIT's Sloan School of Management.
What prompted you to go back and get that graduate degree?

**Brian Singer** (3:38)
So I was really nerdy, loved engineering.
Actually, my first job out of college was designing Fiber Channel ASEX, which I enjoyed. But at a certain point, I realized to really have a lot of impact. It's not just the engineering skills that you need to have, but the softer skills as well, how to work with people and manage people, have people coalesce around an idea. And I'd always been interested in sort of the entrepreneurial process and how great companies get started and all of that. So I was attracted to what Sloan had to offer. And that's really why I went to business school.