Taking Buildkite from a side project to a global company

Summary

👋 Welcome to Valley of Doubt, a free weekly newsletter that goes deep into founder stories from the early days of startups. 🚀Keith Pitt is the co-founder and former CEO of Buildkite, a devtools company that started in Melbourne and grew to have some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies as clients. In this interview we dig into:Starting Buildkite as a side projectRunning out of money and having to go back to investorsThe challenges of growing into a venture capital valuationFinding your product voiceScott Handsaker (SH): Tell me who Keith Pitt is in 30 seconds or less.Keith Pitt (KP): I'm a dad with three kids. I'm someone who loves to explore with his hands and code, and I love exploring ideas. It's no surprise that I ended up in developer tools. Before I was a programmer, I was a magician doing magic shows. That's all about pleasing people, bringing joy and excitement to someone's day, subverting expectations and having them walk away with a memorable experience of something you spent a lot of time working on.Developer tools is the closest I can get to being a magician in programming, because I get to please my peers, help them be better, and bring a little magic to their day.I don't consider myself an entrepreneur. I never have, even though I do entrepreneurial things. I consider myself more of an inventor. The way that I like to figure out if my inventions are any good is by selling them, because I feel like the only true way to determine if something is of value is if someone's bought it.SH: Is the “inventor” identity something that you carry with you throughout your life?KP: Yeah, I think so. I like making stuff, whether it’s Lego with the kids or software for developers. I have a mad Lego collection, but I make something and then just pull it apart and put it in a box because I don't like displaying Lego. I like making it.SH: Tell me how you got started with Buildkite.KP: It was a side project of a side project. I started building an email transaction API lik...