The export bucket

The Export Framework: turn a big company's internal tool into a SaaS

Shaan's 'export bucket': at a big company you see internal tools and unsolved problems. Ex-employees take an internal tool everyone already relies on and rebuild it as a SaaS product every other company can buy.

“And so one of the buckets I always talk about is what I call the export bucket, which is like if you're ever at a big company, you see a whole bunch of problems and solutions. And so you see problems that you didn't know existed, and it's like, dude, we would import a solution, we would buy a solution for this. If somebody could solve this problem for us, we would have bought. And then on the other side, it's like we had this problem, we kind of made an internal tool, man, if this should actually be exported, every company should have this tool.”

Steal thisList the internal tools you can't live without at your big-company job; productize the one no small company could afford to build.

LaunchDarkly exported Facebook's feature-flag tool to every SaaS

Facebook built an internal feature-flag system to roll features out to 1% of users, then ramp. Ex-Facebook people spun this out as LaunchDarkly and sold it to every small company that could never afford to build it themselves, raising over $50 million.

“And so LaunchDarkly was like, you know, a couple of ex-Facebook people spun out and they're like, hey, whatever— I forgot the internal name of that tool at Facebook. It's like, let's call it whatever, codename Medallion. It's like, oh, we're taking Medallion and we're making it available to every SaaS company that exists. And these guys have crushed it. They've raised over $50 million”

Put a Facebook-style engineering bootcamp inside old-school companies

Facebook runs an internal 8-9 week developer bootcamp that turns finance people into Facebook engineers. Shaan's idea: a service company that goes into legacy enterprises (Visa, PwC) and installs that bootcamp, training their teams to work like Facebook's, a people-heavy but high-margin business.

“I think that would be a way to do it, is to go to big old school companies and say, look, we put the Facebook boot camp inside Visa and we will train you, train up some people here, and we'll train them like the Facebook people trade Facebook. And that would be, I think, a dope business.”

Steal thisPackage an elite company's internal upskilling bootcamp as a service for legacy enterprises.