This interview is with Edward Viaene, Managing Director at IN4IT LLC.

Edward Viaene, Managing Director, IN4IT LLC

Edward, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming a tech founder?

I’ve always wanted to become a tech founder. I started my first side business in my teenage years, selling shared access to a server I owned and operated. The server hosted PHP websites and had an email server. Gmail and the public cloud didn’t exist back then, so having gigabytes of website and email storage was exceptional. It also helped me to meet other people in the industry and learn how to run a business. IT infrastructure technologies have come a long way. I now run a Cloud & DevOps consultancy business, helping companies excel in continuously delivering software using cloud products. Recent infrastructure tech is quite complex, so I started creating online courses to cover Cloud & DevOps topics like Kubernetes, Terraform, Golang, and Cloud Security.

What sparked your passion for programming, and how did that lead you to establish your own company?

Around 2002, I wanted to build a website with dynamic elements, so I started learning PHP. It’s an easy language to get started with, and it’s an excellent introduction to the ecosystem of web technologies. Before you know it, you dive into Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and related services. This started to create an interest in the infrastructure side of things. The way everything is set up to make visiting a website or app work is quite intriguing and complex. My first years in infrastructure were focused on system administration. Fast-forward ten years, and the transition from system administration to cloud engineering is full-steam. After a stint in Big Data, the growing popularity of cloud computing made me decide to start a company in the cloud and DevOps space in 2015. The most exciting part is that I never had to give up programming. A lot of cloud and DevOps tooling is done in Golang, a programming language invented by Google. Once I saw the potential, I immediately wanted to master it and started creating my tooling in Go. Now, we offer customers cloud products in Go to provide alternatives to some of the expensive existing cloud products from the big players.

What was the biggest challenge you faced when you first started your company, and how did you overcome it? What advice would you give to aspiring founders facing similar hurdles?

With every business I started, the biggest challenge was getting customers. You can often get your first customers by reaching within your network, but building a reliable marketing and sales pipeline to keep getting more customers is a challenge. I believe engineering problems always have a solution; it’s just a matter of time to figure it out. Getting companies to sign a contract depends on many external factors that you don’t always have influence over. The right mix of inbound and outbound marketing has helped us improve our sales pipeline. Inbound marketing is my preferred method because we can convince users of our expertise. If our blog or podcast already helped someone, it’s already a win before you made the first contact.

The tech landscape is constantly evolving. How do you stay ahead of the curve and ensure your company remains competitive and innovative?

We monitor emerging technologies in the cloud and DevOps space. As a boutique consulting firm, we often receive requests to implement the latest technologies, keeping our knowledge current. With the advent of generative AI, new technologies are also emerging, so keeping informed is part of our job.

Work-life balance is often a challenge for entrepreneurs. What strategies have you found effective in maintaining a healthy balance between your work and personal life?

Delegation is key. Empowering our senior engineers to handle a broad set of tasks allows for a good division of work duties. Our senior engineers have a direct relationship with our customers to keep the feedback loop as short as possible. If a customer needs to escalate something, he or she can still reach the founders quickly, but it only happens sporadically. With online-scheduling tools like Calendly, meetings can be planned efficiently and without disturbing ongoing work.

Looking back on your journey as a tech founder, what is one piece of advice you wish you had received when you were starting out?

Focus on what matters to the customer. In tech, engineers can be obsessive about a specific method, approach, or technology. A customer is not interested in how you did it but in what you did. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, then work out what is essential and what task needs explicitly to be focused on. Within an organization, a lot of work can be spent on things that don’t matter. Finding out what matters and what doesn’t is crucial so you can focus on the essentials.

What’s next for you and your company? What are you most excited about in the future of technology?

Generative AI and novel tools are driving down the cost of delivering tech products. Soon, organizations will start questioning the price of the more-expensive SaaS products. Organizations need help bringing down the cost of infrastructure and developer tooling. We are positioning our company to help organizations navigate this new, upcoming void.