Yoav Landman - Co-Founder of JFrog

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
The Founder Formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future-leaning startups.
Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast-paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show.

**Sandy Salty** (0:30)
Today's guest is a Siri entrepreneur, software architect and one of the co-founders of JFrog. Over the past two decades, he has helped shape the way software is built, managed and delivered across the technology industry. As a co-founder and former chief technology officer of JFrog, he played a key role in growing the company from an idea among engineers into a publicly traded technology company serving thousands of organizations worldwide.
A recognized thought leader in DevOps, Cloud Native Technologies and Software Supply Chain Management, he has spent his career helping develop teams solve complex challenges at scale while continuing to push the industry forward through innovation and open source contributions. Please welcome Yoav Landman.

**Todd Gallina** (1:14)
Welcome, Yoav.

**Yoav Landman** (1:16)
Thank you. Great to be here.

**Todd Gallina** (1:18)
It's great to have you. Let's go ahead and dive right in.
So let's talk about before JFrog became a company, you created something called Artifactory. Tell us what problem you were solving for with Artifactory.

**Yoav Landman** (1:33)
So when I started Artifactory, it was even before JFrog was founded, Artifactory started as an open source project.
What I was doing back then when I started, this was at the end of 2006
I was consulting to companies about creating software in an automated way. This is where a big change in the market happened, where software was starting to get built out of reusable components. Pretty much like you have an airbag in your car and the car manufacturer doesn't manufacture the airbag, but rather he orients it from external sources. This is where open source started to bloom, initially in the Java ecosystem. And I was consulting to very large companies. Basically, this was part of our, we are three founders, this was our first company together, JFrog is our second company together. And part of this consultancy job was being in major thousands of developer organizations. And what I realized is that whenever they lose a component, because it's not available anymore on the internet, they may stop working for a few days, because they cannot rebuild their software if this component is missing or the server that hosts the component is down. At a very specific turning point was a server that actually back in the day just went up in flames. So it was very hard for the company to recover this component that everyone was using. And everyone just deleted this component from their own computers trying to recover. Because this is how developers think. If maybe I'll clean it up and it will get resolved automatically. It didn't. And then they were paralyzed. And I thought, how come this is the situation that people are still dependent on an open source component from the internet that exists out there and may disappear at any given point in time? And this led me to create Artifactory as an open source project initially.
I publicized it on Usenet, if anyone remembers what Usenet is. And it started to create traction really, really quickly. Apparently, it solved real pain.
Maybe in six months, there were 20,000 installations of Artifactory. Back then, it was an on-premise solution. And that was the turning point. Once the adoption was so compelling, it led to the creation of JFrog in 2008

**Sandy Salty** (4:22)
That's awesome.
You aren't the first company that's gone from open-source to a full-blown, publicly traded company. We're excited to hear when you realize it could go from product to company, and maybe some of the steps that you needed to go through to make this more proprietary and less open-source.

**Yoav Landman** (4:49)
Ah, that's easier. I mean, once you look at the adoption, and back then you can relate the IP address of the company to what the company is really, which company it really is, you see that the adoption is being made, is being done by major enterprises globally.
And then you realize that you're solving your real pain, that you're actually helping enterprises achieve trusted software, which is still what JFrog is doing today. JFrog is helping companies deliver trusted software through the JFrog platform. So that was the turning point that was very evident that this could be a real business.

**Todd Gallina** (5:33)
That's great, Yoav. And let's go back to the beginning with respect to the naming of the company itself. We found that some founders take months, years, to think through what they want to name their business, and others don't spend any time at all, and kind of come up with some random naming conventions. What's the significance of JFrog?