Ep127 – Lachlan Donald (Co-founder & CEO – Buildkite) on equity over ego

September 3, 2020
rohitbhargava
Podcast

My guest for Episode 127 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & CEO of Buildkite, Lachlan Donald.

Lachlan has been a technologist for over 20 years. In addition to building companies, he is drawn to building products that change how people think and work.

Before Buildkite, he was the founding CTO of 99designs, the world’s largest online graphic design marketplace. 99Designs connects businesses looking for design work with more than 220,000 graphic designers from 192 countries around the world.

Lachlan is now the Co-founder and CEO of Buildkite, the fastest way to reliably test and build software at any scale.

Buildkite is one of Australia’s best keep secrets. They raised AUD$200,000 in seed funding when the company was first founded in 2013 and over the last 7 years have turned away investor interest to focus on profitability of the business.

However, Buildkite recently announced an AUD$28M Series A funding round led by Openview, providing a 42x return to it’s early investors.

In this interview we discussed:

Being intentional with focus
The craftsmanship behind enduring products
Buildkite’s unique approach to sharing CEO roles between the founders
The importance of equity over ego
Buildkite’s fundraising process for it’s $28M Series A funding round after 7 years of bootstrapping
& much more!

Full interview below!

Show notes:

Special Thanks:

Special thanks to John Barton, Doug English and Matt Allen who helped with research for this interview.

Next interview:

Join our next live podcast interview with Holly Cardew, the Founder of Pixc and Co-founder of Vop.
Date: 8th September 2020
Time: 8-9am (AEDT)
Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/Ep128Holly