Welcome to the latest installment of SaaSlife SPOTLIGHT, where we shine a light on innovative SaaS companies and their leaders. Today, we are thrilled to feature Tim Gilboy, Co-Founder & COO of Sourcery.
Tim shared insights into her founder journey, the challenges of building a startup, and the exciting future of Sourcery.
Dan: How are you Tim?
Tim : I'm doing well, thanks for having me here, Dan.
Dan: No problem. I'm sure that it's exceptionally busy for yourselves being in the world of a thriving SaaS startup.
Dan: Just wanted to say before we start, congratulations on being listed in the Focal 100.
Tim: Oh, thank you
Dan: For anybody that's listening and that doesn't understand what the Focal 100 list is for startups, can you give them a little bit of an overview and background of what that means for you and Sourcery?
Tim: Yeah, definitely. So the Focal 100 is a global startup competition made up of different companies who are relatively early on, looking across all different industries, all different fields, to try and get in front of investors and potential customers. We were lucky enough to be named one of the top 100 companies in that list this year.
What do Sourcery do?
Dan: Can you please explain it to anybody listening as though, well, I'm a five-year-old and in its simplest form, what is it that Sourcery does?
Tim: Sure, so Sourcery provides automated code reviews for software engineering teams. Probably the best way to think about it is if you think about an author writing a book, they'll almost always have an editor. That editor is going to be somebody who's going in, looking at what they wrote, and figuring out how to make it better. The same thing happens with almost every software engineering team out there. One developer writes code, somebody else on the team goes in, they take a look at it, and they edit it and give feedback. Now the problem is developers are really busy. They're doing a hundred other things on top of code reviews. So that process can take a couple of hours, take a couple of days, take a couple of weeks in some cases. Sourcery's whole goal is to do that in five minutes, directly where the developer is. So instead of having to wait, maybe change what you're doing, go work on something else, then come back to all that feedback, you can just go right back. You get that feedback right away, get some edits you need to make to your code, and might be told, "Here's actually how you can make it even better." Then you can make those changes right away, all while you're still in that same frame of mind. So you can keep working and keep being productive.
Real-World Application and Language Agnosticism
Dan: So if, just a real-world example, the is an organization that's understaffed within an engineering function, I imagine this would save them X amount of man hours.
Tim: Oh, a hundred percent. So whether you're understaffed or not, it's able to unlock a ton of time for developers, both because those engineers, typically who are the senior developers who are doing a lot of the code reviews, can spend less time on the actual review process. We still usually see teams have a human reviewer, but they're able to spend a fraction of the time they usually would. But then the developers who are writing the code themselves, they're able to just get everything done faster. You see velocity increase, cycle time decrease, and so productivity across the board jumps.
Dan: Amazing. Is this language agnostic?
Tim: Yeah, so fully language agnostic. We started off focused on Python, but at this point we support more than 40 languages. I think with the exception of a couple of languages from the early eighties that I've seen it not work great on, everything else seems to work really nicely.
Dan: Yeah, you'll have somebody with a COBOL system somewhere.
Tim: Even COBOL works pretty well, I will say. But some of the other more obscure ones I've seen some issues with.
The Origin Story of Sourcery
Dan: How would you describe the founding/ origin journey of Sourcery? At what point was it that you thought businesses need to have this in place?
Tim: So it's been a pretty long journey to get there. I can't take any credit for the original startup idea. That has to go to my two co-founders, Brendan and Nick. They've both been software developers in industry for more than 15 years each. They started their career working at a retail financial software company that had most of its code base written back in the 1980s. By the time they joined, it was a 20-plus year legacy code base with all of the pains of a 20-plus year-old legacy code base. They got very good at working with code that had all sorts of technical debt and issues. After working there for a number of years, they thought there must be a way to automate some of the code refactoring and code improvement processes that they had become very good at over the years.
That was the first version of Sourcery. We were looking at how to automatically look at code and suggest to developers better ways of writing it, but very much with this idea of code quality and modernization. Our first product was largely almost like a Grammarly for code. You would be writing your code, you'd get immediate suggestions and feedback on it. But then over the last couple of years, as we've been working on that, we've learned from more and more teams that actually the big bottleneck here is around code review more broadly. It's not just these discrete changes to make to the code, but a whole picture of, "Hey, this change, how does it fit into the bigger system? Is it doing what we need it to do? How do we just speed up that review cycle?" That's really where the seed of the current version of Sourcery, this code review product, came from.
Current Market Reception
Dan: In terms of customer base at the moment, how's the more modern version of Sourcery being taken on by businesses?
Tim: Yeah, so we're finding the market is really interested in it. Especially on the team side, we're having dozens of engineering teams come to us every week, trying it out. It's really easy to get started. I think you just basically two clicks and it's in your GitHub repo and giving you code reviews. We're starting to see more and more teams take us up on that, getting some really good feedback from teams about what they're liking and also where they need it to go in the future. We're just excited to keep improving it and keep expanding it out.
Feedback Loop and Developer Engagement
Dan: Do you find that you're getting a lot through the feedback loop from developers?
Tim: Oh yeah, definitely. Getting a ton from developers. They're a great audience to work with because, as you said, they will be very honest with you about what is good and what is not. Oftentimes they think, "I could do it better and here's how," which actually becomes really good feedback. We're thinking about, "Okay, how could we frame how to improve our product?" It also helps because we're all constantly writing code ourselves and can just test our own product frequently and see where does it fall short for ourselves? We know if it's falling short for us, it's falling short for our users. It gives us a clear path for how to improve it.
Sourcery's Future Vision
Dan: If we were to look at kind of a mountain or a journey, where would you say that you are on the mountain at the moment in terms of where you believe the product will be? Do you think that where you are with Sourcery right now is longer-term what everybody should expect or is there more in the offering of how you see it pivoting?
Tim: There's so much more in the offering as we move forward, definitely. I'd say we're starting our way up the mountain and we've got a good base camp established. But there are so many pieces of the software development lifecycle that there's opportunities to improve them and help them. I think none of us at Sourcery really buy into this "software developers are gonna get automated away" hype that you see from some folks in the AI space. But I definitely think there's a lot of ways to make their life a lot easier. We are constantly getting asked by different engineering teams, "Hey, how could you help us automate this piece of this lifecycle or this part?" All of those are typically tasks where developers know they have to do them, but they're really repetitive and they don't like doing them. There's good space to think about test generation, documentation, checking if things match up with business requirements or technical specs. All of those kinds of components we're going to continue to expand into in the coming years and really look to supercharge developers and engineering teams.
The Next 12 Months for Sourcery
Dan: So the next 12 months, crystal ball time, if we were to have this conversation again in 12 months' time, where do you see Sourcery in 12 months' time?
Tim: I think over the next 12 months we're going to be rolling out a lot more of our product capabilities. Right now, I think we have a really good MVP of what we're doing for this code review process. We're seeing teams use it effectively. I think over the next 12 months, what you're going to start seeing from Sourcery is a much more holistic product that covers more of the lifecycle of that developer workflow. So really trying to move from just this discrete code review component into more of these other areas where we can help improve the entire process of writing, testing, and deploying code.
Dan: So, I think we'll be very interested to get you back on in 12 months' time and see how that journey's been for you.
Tim: Yeah, definitely.
The Sourcery Culture
Dan: For anyone listening interested in joining Sourcery now or in the future, how would you describe the company culture? Any why would someone want to join?
Tim: I think there's two big things. I think one, we're working on an incredibly fun, hard set of problems that are at the cutting edge of what is existing in software development tools. So blending together very deep static analysis with everything at the forefront of large language models and how does that interplay with code, which I think for better or worse, we are kind of at the forefront of what people have figured out in terms of techniques. A lot of our work is R&D focused and figuring out what's the next best way to do things - so if you enjoy those types of problems...we have a whole host of those to work on.
The other bit is we're a very autonomous team. We trust everybody to take a lot of ownership in the work they do and spearhead the work that they're working on. We're fully remote.
Advice to Founders
Dan: Do you have any advice for any budding SaaS founders that are considering setting up?
Tim: Hmm, that's a tough one - I would say don't fall in love with your idea. Be willing to listen to customers and pivot to find product market fit.
For those interested in learning more about Sourcery, you can reach Tim on LinkedIn.
From inception to future aspirations, Sourcery's AI automated code reviewing has the opportunity to save companies money, development teams hours and have a huge positive impact on mentoring and self-assessing!
To listen to the full interview - please check it out!
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