Founder in Focus: Keith Neilson, AppFactor
We sit down with Keith Neilson, founder of AppFactor, to find out what happens if companies don’t address technical debt and modernisation and how he tries to always make the right decisions.
The ticking time bomb of technical debt.
It’s not every day that you meet someone who is as genuinely passionate about technical debt and application modernisation as Keith Neilson is, but then not everyone is Keith Neilson.
For the uninitiated, Keith’s enthusiasm for these topics is borderline alarming - until you appreciate the stakes: Technical debt costs 15 - 60% of every dollar spent on IT and it’s a $1.52 Trillion problem to fix.
It’s not only his passion that makes Keith such an impressive founder, his skill set is pretty unique too. As well as being a genuinely lovely and down-to-earth person, he combines nearly two decades of deep technical skills with business acumen and a creative flair.
Over a short call, with Keith donning AppFactor merch, we discussed how this company came to be, why focus is essential for success and how the problem of old, unsupported or ageing software is exponentially increasing.
About AppFactor
AppFactor is an AI-augmented developer platform that modernises legacy applications and continuously finds and fixes technical debt. The platform automates the process of identifying technical debt, assesses application health and prioritises modernisation efforts.
By streamlining this complex process, AppFactor helps organisations to reduce costs, improve performance, improve developer experience and enhance security in minutes, not months.
Founded in: 2021
Employee count: 11-50
HQ: London, UK
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Total funding to date: £1.9m
The interview:
We always start by asking founders or operators “why this?”, “why now?” and “why you?” Answers to these questions peel back the lid on what makes founders tick, why their solution will succeed and ultimately, why you should care.
Why now
For us, I think it really is a prime example of stars aligning in terms of timing.
One of those is that we've had about 17 years of cloud transformation, which is predominantly seeing something that we call “lift and shift.” It means re-hosting existing applications from a server to another cloud-based server. One of the consequences of that, despite it being a way of getting a quick win to the cloud, was that those systems really lacked optimisation.
We've seen a need to try and control cloud costs, and what it's actually done is just shift the technical debt from point A to point B. What we've seen very recently is a shift of focus in the industry. Lift and shift was good for a subset of applications that didn't require many changes, but that's now run its course because what organisations were left with was a huge amount of applications that weren't in a state to be moved that way. They needed more transformational effort applied to them.
Organisations are now looking to modernise applications that couldn't be moved in that lift and shift phase. The more complex applications are often the more critical and risky applications. Those lifted and shifted applications now need to be transformed as well and moved up into the more mature cloud stack.
So, that's the first macro piece we've seen across the industry. This is compounded by the exponential speed of newer technology emerging. The pace of this is way too fast for a traditional process that we have for modernisation to keep up.
The gaps between old, unsupported or ageing software is exponentially increasing faster than our rate of actually being able to address it and CIOs are looking at this as a top three focus.
Why this?
If organisations don’t maintain their applications or modernise them continuously, the business will fundamentally become uncompetitive to their customers.
You've got regulated, governed industries and verticals that cannot be seen to run their applications on vulnerable, out-of-date or underlying systems lacking support. This is because it poses a significant risk of fines, costs and regulation controls.
So, it's a fundamental piece of technology. It's a pervasive issue, this technical debt challenge. It’s everywhere and it compounds over time if it's not addressed, and everyone knows that. The challenge is that the speed and time to deliver these things are inherently slow, incredibly costly, very manual and mostly untouched.
With our solution, we wanted to build an end-to-end product that supports the entire journey and process of observing and understanding our existing applications, what we call “observability”. What that means is, we're assessing four layers of technology that support our applications, which is quite unique to us.
We look at the infrastructure and we look at the architecture pattern that it's currently running in as well as the underlying code and its dependencies. Our observability piece really contextualises applications. It works incredibly quickly, and the time to value is minutes for an organisation to understand the current lie of the land. It also quantifies and measures technical debt. It unearths things like security vulnerabilities, end-of-life components, and visualises all of these things so that we can very quickly pinpoint areas of focus, prioritise and plan the next step.
Organisations move through a wizard-driven process, which is repeatable and predictable. We generate all of these automatically through an AI and machine learning process that we've built within the product. Users can leverage automation to handle mundane tasks like documentation of their code bases and It’s useful to businesses because it highlights and fixes complex issues that an engineer perhaps doesn't have the skill set.
Why you?
As a team, we’re unique in that we've operated in this specific market for over ten years. It's a domain that hasn't always seen many products, but we've got experience in building, designing, launching and executing two different products in the space. One of these became an AWS product.
From cradle to grave, we've been exposed to some of the biggest cloud transformation initiatives that the market has ever seen. This has exposed us to a tremendous amount of feedback from partners, customers and the cloud providers themselves. It’s helped to hone and define our proposition over the last few years. We've got incredible knowledge and experience of what's actually required and how to take this product to market.
I’m also a bit of a rare breed! I have a technical background, but I've always been very commercially aware and quite creative. These kinds of traits allow me to build and define the collateral, the website and the branding. Equally, I've got experience in building highly functional teams and leading from the front. In every business I’ve been in, I've always dovetailed into engineering, product, marketing and sales, so I can empathise with the challenges that every part of the organisation faces and what we're trying to do as a wider team.
Also, we're having great fun and I think that's the really important piece of this. It's super busy and super tough. We're moving fast, but at the same time, everyone is really passionate about what we're building and the problem that we're solving. I think that's key because that comes across when we engage with customers. We really do care about the problems they face. Our product is simply a manifestation of us wanting to solve the problem.
What are the biggest challenges that you’ve had to overcome?
The main challenge that we have is focus. Really, really qualifying as best we can to make sure that the effort we put in, which fundamentally is always equal, for a small or a large opportunity, is helping us to get those proof points earlier rather than later.
Because of the problem that we're solving, we’re engaged with a significant number of enterprises and they're slightly slower moving. It's been quite testing for us to focus and prioritise within that pipeline.
There's just a team of engineers right now and trying to balance feature requests with important things in our roadmap and handling customer engagement when we don't have any dedicated resources is tough. It's testing on everybody in the team, so we’re trying to rally the team up and keep them ahead of the huge amount of work that's going on. That's why it's so important to prioritise. Wins that we make help us go further. You’ve got to run. Once you're on the treadmill, you've got to run.
What factors have contributed most to AppFactor’s success?
First and foremost, it's the team that we have. We’ve built such a great team spirit and culture. The founding team have worked together for around six years, and there are some team members who have worked with each other for 25 years - so, we're incredibly close.
Also, the core values that we have in the team are very genuine.
Everyone has a voice and there's no wrong answer. We investigate and listen to everyone's opinion because that's the value of the team. I also think the team’s genuine technical talent is extraordinary.
It does come down to people. Whether it be internally or externally with customers and partners, we're engaging with people.
If you were starting out again, would there be any advice that you would give to your younger self?
I've been involved in some super young businesses and really helped drive them to success, but despite all the learnings that I've had, you naturally still have to make assumptions. There are still things that become an oversight or something you didn't consider would be such a challenge that ends up being a challenge. But, I don't know if I’d change anything!
I’d make sure to be receptive to potential oversights made. Be receptive to the fact that you might not get things right, and you need to measure the impact and be able to go back and rectify those if needed.
As long as you've sought advice and tried to make the best decision possible, then that's all you can really do.
You've also got to believe in yourself and be happy with the decisions that you've made. It's not easy. Sometimes you don't have the right data points for decisions and you've got to learn pretty quickly to get comfortable with that. You've got to build a solid team around you. Not just the actual business team, but your advisors, and seek counsel. Don't be afraid to just sanity-check your thought process.
What other founders or startups inspire you right now and why?
It's pretty hard to ignore the likes of Wiz. I think they have groundbreaking execution on just the most insane level. It’s pretty awe-inspiring. When you look under the hood for how they've done that, there's a degree of reassurance, and after getting advice, they really believed that their decision was the right one. For example, they turned down an acquisition at £23 billion, which was pretty hard to ignore! Also, the speed and pace of how they've done it, I think it’s a great poster to put on the wall and say it can actually be done. Let’s try and unpick it, find out how they've done it and learn from it.
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