Elevating the SaaS Application Development Experience with Salman Paracha

Salman Paracha, Founder & CEO at Katanemo Labs, joins Corey at Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his vision for the future of SaaS application development. Salman and Corey discuss what led him to take the leap into founding a start-up, and Salman shares how he believes the future of SaaS application development is at an inflection point. Salman also explains why it’s critical to focus on the outcome your customers experience over infrastructure, and shares his vision for future developers looking to build the next wave of SaaS applications. 
About SalmanBuilding high-growth, high-tech software products that affect the lives of millions of customers. 15+ years of experience in building successful products and highly effective teams. I am deeply interested in bringing the power of the cloud to end customers, large scale data problems, and delivering scalable services on commodity hardware.

Links Referenced: Katanemo: https://www.katanemo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salmanparacha/ Email: mailto:salman@katanemo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salman_paracha


Transcript
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. And this promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud is brought to us by our friends at Katanemo, who is—when you talk to small startups, like, “Who should we talk to?” They invariably look around the room, figure out who they should throw directly into the grist mill, and in this particular case, they have selected Salman Paracha, who is the founder and CEO. Salman, thank you for joining me.

Salman: Hey, thanks for having me. Second time.

Corey: It is. And every time we talk, it seems like there has been an interesting progression in your career. Originally, when we first started talking, you were the GM of the serverless application repository at AWS, and of AWS SAM, the Serverless Application Model that most people know because of the giant psychotic squirrel running around the expo hall at events. Then you went to be a group VP at Oracle Cloud, and now you look around the landscape and decide, you know, what I’ve done my entire career? Worked at big companies where everything is, you know, convenient in certain ways. And that sucks. I want everything to be three times harder, at least, so I’m going to go start a startup of my own. Presumably. I’m assuming that is the thought process that led you here. What’s the actual story behind why you decided to leave giant corporate entities and go to a small startup?

Salman: Thanks for that intro. The primary reason to sort of pursue this dream was something was pulling at me for the past four to five years. As a person who considers himself a builder, the most happiest I am when I’m actually trying to ship software out for customers. And so, I’ve been pulling on this thread for a very, very long time, that the world of the modern reference architecture, as it goes more microservices and explodes in the face of developers, has gotten to a point that we are now being inundated with all these micro-primitives, if you would, on infrastructure that actually slow the rate of innovation down. And why hasn’t there been a move and