[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I'm lucky enough to be joined by Ole Lensmar. He is the co-founder and CTO at Testkube, a Kubernetes native platform that powers continuous testing for today's AI accelerated development.

How did I do Ole? Was that good?

[00:00:44] Ole: It was awesome. Very eloquently put, uh, love that description. Thank you so much.

[00:00:47] Jay: Oh, thank you.

[00:00:48] Ole: It's great to be here. 

[00:00:49] Jay: It's almost like you wrote it. 

[00:00:51] Ole: It's almost, I'm, sure what was involved at some point. 

[00:00:55] Jay: you might've been somewhere. all right. Ole, where are you from and did that have any impact on you being, an entrepreneur?

[00:01:01] Ole: long story. I'm, currently, I've been living in Sweden for 40 years. I'm originally from Germany, I guess. I've grew up, Germany in the US and then in mostly in Sweden and another two years in the US and maybe if that didn't have an impact, maybe, the fact that I've moved around a lot and learned languages and.

Been, you know, required to adapt to new situations and, find my way forward. And, you know, maybe that has helped me, not like directly as an entrepreneur, but maybe those kind of foster traits that are helpful now, being an entrepreneur. 

[00:01:33] Jay: this is a dumb American question and you're gonna have to play, you know, Mr.

Global, worldwide, you know, knowledge here, but, Do you think that it's easier or harder to start a business in Europe in tech than in the United States? 

[00:01:50] Ole: It's definitely harder in Europe. okay. I mean, Europe, at least from my experience, the appetite and risk appetite, is very different in, the Europe and in Sweden.

I guess maybe in Sweden is maybe a little bit more closer to the us but I think it's still far from. what you have in the US with, this kind of, uh, mindset around investing into startups and ideas and people. I think there's just a totally different level of maturity and, insight into how that whole process works in the us.

I think Europe is still far behind, unfortunately, and I think that's why, I mean, you see all the big, I mean, obviously all the big, you know. Big companies, most of them are from the US and I think it's, it must, and if they aren't from the us that's where they usually end up, just like, mm-hmm. Klarna, just, just listed on in New York or nasdaq, I guess.

So, uh, that's where, where they end up. 

[00:02:45] Jay: So is it kind of a race to get to the United States market, like when you're creating a business over there. 

[00:02:52] Ole: Maybe not a race, but it's, usually just maybe a part, a natural progression that you start here with an idea and maybe you know, you get some, state funded traction or you find some early investors that are, have maybe a more, you know, believe in you or like willing to risk it with you.

But I think if you wanna raise the big money, or, it's usually you go over the pond, to, 'cause you just, it's easier to find expertise, and. Willingness and understanding of what you're doing and how you can fit into the world. Hmm. 

[00:03:22] Jay: was Testkube your first company? 

[00:03:24] Ole: No, I've, done a bunch of startups actually, since the mid nineties.

First like a, an internet startup,in 96 that was, acquired 99, and then I started a. Testing software company, which created, I created a tool called, SoapUI, which is very, very popular for many, many years. An API testing tool, an open source tool that was also then commercialized, and then that was acquired by Smart Bear and that's when I joined Smart Bear, like 2011.

And then, smart Bear, I, helped grow that company and that's also why, where I got to learn my other co-founder. I got to know my co-founder of Test Dmitry, who's the CEO of the company. 

[00:04:02] Jay: I, always tell people I do as much homework for these episodes, as I did in high school, which is just enough to pass.

[00:04:09] Ole: So I didn't know that you were the founder of SoapUI. yes. That is my legacy. 

[00:04:16] Jay: Oh my God. Talk about that is fantastic. And then it got, I knew I got acquired by Smart Bear. I know the Smart Bear folks. We knew some of the same people just from being in the same sphere. That's very cool. so, talk a little bit about why.

You started making testing tools, like why not development tools? Why not another product? What, in QA kind of made you kind of go after that market? 

[00:04:37] Ole: It was, I think CPI was a classic Scratch your own itch thing. I was like an architect in an SOAR, uh, project at a Swedish company and we needed a testing tool to test our soap APIs basically.

And there was no such. Tool at the market, at least not free. I think the closest you could get at the time was maybe JMeter, which was not super easy to use. And then there were a bunch of commercial options, like Mind Reef and soap scope, all these kind of tools. and then, so it was kind of a mix of that.

there wasn't really an open source tool on the market. I was looking for a hobby, project, and I just love to code. so I think those kind of stars aligned. And so I built that. Tool mainly for our project. And then when we had it, I felt like, hmm, maybe this is something other people would enjoy.

So it, we put it on SourceForge, which was the, the open source community at the time. yeah, I guess it took off pretty quickly from there. I think there was just, there was a big demand for that kind of tool that there was really no competition. 

[00:05:35] Jay: Something that I talked to Todd over at Reflect and other tools.

Creators in the QA space. I always wonder like, who's buying this shit? Like the QA team doesn't normally have a budget, right? So it's a very interesting target to sell at. And I've always found qa, the QA product world. Very interesting about like how you get to the people that. Have a budget and have the ability to spend money when qa, you're solving a QA problem.

Although QA is usually a line item in the bigger budget. So it's not easy to get to. How did you, I guess first of all, how did you kind of solve that problem? especially with Testkube and these other things we'll talk about, but how are you selling into a space where the main users of the platform, the main drivers, the main champions, aren't typically the ones with the pocketbook?

[00:06:26] Ole: So that's actually super interesting question. 'cause I would, I would, my experience is, well, almost the opposite. So it's to say that, selling to devs is a problem. and, from, SoapUI, we had a lot of dev, developers using, SoapUI and they would never pay for the commercial option,

Version. But QA teams were used to paying for tools from our experience. I mean, SoapUI was a very cheap tool compared to maybe is a tool like Testkube, so it was usually we felt that if we can get like a certain percentage of, our users and, QA teams, we knew that they were prepared to pay for their tools because there was a big market around.

Commercial tooling for qa, for test management, and, you know, everything around testing. So that's really interesting that you say that because, that's kind of how we've always said felt that, at least from my experience is that,QA is more, QA people are more. Prepared to pay for tools and developers who think I can just build this myself, and I'm guilty of that of course.

So, why would I, you know, I, why would I pay $200 for something that I can build my in three months? 

[00:07:28] Jay: Sure. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. And I, I guess, 

yeah, I, I guess QA people 

can't do that.they don't have the option to go. typically aren't gonna go build a tool themselves, so maybe that's,

[00:07:38] Ole: well, yeah.

Yeah, maybe, maybe now with shift, maybe it's an historic view, maybe you know, as testing has moved shifted left and being become more of a maybe code centric or code coding exercise. Like, you know, you write your playwright. And Cypress tests and whatever else in code, maybe that is also changed.

So maybe that's in, maybe I'm talking about, you know, how it was 10, 15 years ago, and maybe that's no longer true today, but that's, at least, that's why, just to answer your question, we felt that, or historically it just felt that QA is, a better market to sell to, than dev developers at least. 

[00:08:13] Jay: And, and it totally may be that you're coming at from the more accurate product.

Perspective, and I'm more from the service perspective, and been, you know, been in the QA space and been a QA guy forever. so yeah, it's interesting coming from a guy who sold a bunch of these products from, you know, better than I do,who the target market is.

we found some pushback or hesitance at that QA management layer because they didn't typically have the. Like I said, the purse strings,to make those decisions, they go back to the CTO, they would say, yeah, this is why we need this tool. They get to sign off, they get budget, and then they'd implement.

So, I, love to hear new and different perspectives, so that's good. So tell me about Testkube. Where did the idea come from? how did you spin it up? What was the problem you saw? And just kind of gimme the genesis of the platform. 

[00:08:57] Ole: Sure. I think going back a little bit, I've always like if you go five, 10 years ago, always been a little bit frustrated with how testing was done in CI tools.

If you look at Jenkins and others, well, maybe originally Jenkins and, then GitHub actions, other testing was kind of always a. Third level, third class citizen or a second class citizen. So it was, tests were buried in pipelines and it was really hard to get an overview of kind of test results across all your pipelines.

And having just for testers specifically, it was, they were not very empowered, uh, in the, in the context of CICD tooling. So the idea was really initially, can we just somehow break out? Testing part of CICD into its own platform, which is more test tester oriented, where testers can manage the testing part, you know, the test execution part.

They can work with results, they can troubleshoot. They don't have to go into, you know, logs from Jenkins or good of actions or whatever you might be using. For CICD, it was, it was more of a decoupling and also. From the need, from what, I guess from that SmartBear, you know, people saying, I want, I wanna run my test outside of CICD.

And it was often very tied to your builds, right? If you wanna run your integration tests, you have to run a, build a pipeline. and that was not very empowering for testers and QA teams. They were kind of, you know, the, submitting stuff to the, the ops team or the dev team say, Hey, could you add this test?

The pipeline and let's see how it goes. So I think that was kind of the idea is to decouple testing, from CICD. Uh, and then I think from there,and try to build a more test. Execution focused platform. And I get, and then when we started kind of, being more serious about this idea, then also the question of came up, okay, okay, how are we gonna run all these tests?

And Kubernetes was kind of taking off at the time, so that seemed like a great platform, a generic platform. Everyone was dockerizing all their tools. So let's say what if, why don't we just use Kubernetes as the engine to run any test that any testing tool that can be dockerized and build a. Control plane on top of that, or whatever word you wanna use, that then makes that a avail, available to your CICD tool, but also to other ways of running your tests and other way, and other ways of interacting with your tests and really more focusing for testers.

I think that was the original idea at least. 

[00:11:17] Jay: do you have any idea of the footprint of Kubernetes? Like just as a percentage of the overall kind of development market? Do? I'm just curious, do you know like how, many companies are using it out there?

[00:11:29] Ole: I don't have any numbers. My, I mean, my gut feeling, it's still pretty low in the, I think, I guess most companies are many are dabbling or looking at it, but like using it in, production.

I would say it's. I don't have any numbers. I'm not gonna say any numbers, but it's, I think it's still low, but I, know that, adoption is, I mean, there's a big appetite, to move towards it Kubernetes and, migrate to Kubernetes. But of course, in a large organization that can take a lot of time and it's 

Not just a technical shift, but also cultural shift. Of course. 

[00:11:59] Jay: So who was the first customer? 

who's the first customer of Testkube? 

[00:12:03] Ole: So the first customer, I'm not, I'm not gonna say the name, but, it was actually because Testkube was also originally an, or still is, an open source product, was actually a support contract for the open source tool.

so this was a, European, governmental, organization that was adopting Testkube open source. and they wanted to get, have some features in there that weren't, but also wanted, needed to have, like from a, legal per perspective, a con, a support contract. So that was kind of the first, commercial customer.

And then. the first customer of the commercial tool. To be honest, I don't remember exactly who that was. it was not that long ago. I, have a couple of names on my head, but I'm not, I don't remember exactly, but it was also, as far as I remember, a big, this us, Insurance, company that was, kind of really a sweet spot for what we, where we think Testkube is at a company that's both adopting Kubernetes, that has a legacy stack with Jenkins, et cetera.

And is just realizing we're running all these tests all over the place. We don't have really one place where we can manage our testing. It's all buried in pipelines and we need to surface that,and have a more standardized way how we do testing as we go into cloud data. 

[00:13:15] Jay: I love that. now, how's that changed since you started?

I know you said it hasn't been a long time. Has there been a shift in the ICP that you guys are going after? Have you learned some stuff as you've gone along and maybe you're targeting companies differently? Like how, who's your, we know who your first customer was? How does that compare to who your customers are going after today?

[00:13:34] Ole: No, I think that's actually, maybe one of, that's, maybe one of the bigger, things that didn't go as we thought is that we, were kind of coming from Smart Bear, which was a, tools provider for the individuals. Right. so we were hoping for maybe something like, SoapUI, right, so it's, people buy with a credit card and it's a very.

Automated process, but Testkube is more of an enterprise sales, product. It's something that large corporations, adopt to really standardize on how they do testing in their cloud native in infrastructure and architectures. So I, and I think that's really where most of the value of the product is, 

there, right?

So for a small, a startup with 10 people that's running some, you know, postman tests in GitHub actions. Probably not. Uh, you don't need Testkube at that point. but like I said earlier, if you're, if you have two or three CICD tools, which is pretty common nowadays, you have both Jenkins and you have GitHub actions or GitLab, and then you're doing Flex or Argo for GI ops, and then you're.

Running all these kind of different tests, and now that you're provisioning infrastructure, thanks to Kubernetes, you're dynamically creating clusters. Maybe you have a platform engineering team. So you also need to look at how do we validate the infrastructure, not just the applications running in the infrastructure and you're.

Doing different types of testing across the entire, like lifecycle of your, of the products or the software that you're building. And you just like to get that into one place instead of having, you know, there's some tests running in GitLab and there's some things being triggered by Argo and there's something over here.

It, just gets very, fragmented. and I think that's once again where Testkube really comes in to kind of. Pull all that together into one place, and then built on Kubernetes, which gives it a lot of strengths around how it works with GitHubs and other things that people are adopting today.

[00:15:23] Jay: curious about the open source. Model. why do you like that route? What you know? Is it, al altruistic from a, you know, giving something back perspective? And then just outta CI mean, just for those who don't know, including myself, is the sup. I mean, I've heard that the support.

Path is typically the way to monetize the open source model. Is that how you guys, and I know you have kinda the commercial, do you still have two flavors of it? Do you have like an open source and then a commercial grade? Like what is the open source kind of set up? Why did you do it? Just talk a little bit more about 

[00:15:54] Ole: Yeah, 

[00:15:54] Jay: what, what your thoughts are on open source.

[00:15:56] Ole: I think open source was, is a way for us to validate the idea, I guess, is to get something out there to, engage with, you know, initial users and hopefully get them to contribute. It's not always, possible, but, it, it's feels like a very low touch and a bottom up way to get into a space that's an engineering, software.

Savvy or a heavy space. I think, and what we were, the plan was, and this is kind of what we've done with Sopi and also many of the products at, SmartBear Swagger specifically that I was very involved in, was to have like a, basic, or a. an open source offering that people can use as a standalone thing.

It has to have, definitely have its value on its own. totally fine with having a big open source user base that is not, you know, monetized. I think they're great. I. Brings us feedback into the product, into the direction, and also gives us, a footprint in the space, which I think is super important.

And then on top of that, building in a commercial offering that caters to those enterprise ICPs that you, that we talked about, where they are, definitely willing to, you know, they see the value in those added on those added commercial features, and they're willing to, pay for them. 

[00:17:07] Jay: How do you sell 'em to the enterprise?

It's a nightmare. It's a long tail cycle. There's a million people to talk to. There's so much politics. It's, just like we, stick with kind of, you know, larger SMB into, you know, into like mid-market kind of space just because you can still get some human beings, along the way. And interactions.

How do you sell into the enterprise space and keep your sanity. 

[00:17:36] Ole: I think we, from what we see is that we still land initially with ops teams, uh, interestingly for Testkube. Uh, and so who are maybe the ones, if you look at that ICP that we talked about, they're the ones tasked with building up this new infrastructure, or cloud native platform.

And testing is a part of that. And they're, kind of scratching their head or seeing the opportunity or looking for a way to opt to, to, can maybe overhaul and centralize how, how do we do testing? And I'm, and I think we have a lot of our, the messaging that we have and the material that we produce is geared at those problems that they.

Stumble into, initially it could be very tool centric, right? People who try to run K six tests in Kubernetes or other tools that we kind of support. So I think that's kind of how we land. And then we sell, we try to, you know, uh. very early talk to them, and, do demos and try to really get them to see how the bigger picture of Testkube, because as I said, maybe they initially just see it as an efficient way to run K six tests.

And we're like, well, actually it's a, you can do much more than that. So it's important for us to have an early interaction with those, engineers that discover us. And then usually we land with like one department in a large organization and then we grow, into the organization from there. 

[00:18:56] Jay: Have you had a lot of success scaling horizontally through those orgs?

[00:19:01] Ole: it's too early to say a lot of success.

[00:19:03] Jay: Okay.

[00:19:03] Ole: But that's definitely what we see, that we are scaling horizontally into the orgs where we have our. An initial where we get an initial footprint. 

[00:19:11] Jay: All right? In five years or 10 years, if everything goes perfect, where is Testkube, in the next five to 10 years?

What is the vision of the product? If everything that you guys have planned and you wanna do comes to fruition, what is it gonna be in five to 10 years? 

[00:19:29] Ole: I, I think Testkube today is very focused on test execution. If you look at the software testing lifecycle, one of those lifecycle things, I think we can go far beyond that.

and, broaden both into like, the areas of, test management or, managing, testing environments. These are things people ask us about a lot. So kind of are spreading across the entire software testing lifecycle and either integrating with tools or building our own functionality. So we'd like to be like a.

One stop shop for your testing needs. when it comes to, like con cloud native, infrastructures, applications, I don't think, we don't plan to compete with testing tools per se, so we're not gonna create our own load testing tool or end-to-end testing tool. I think that's, there's a very healthy and, great, ecosystem of tools out there.

But I think tying those together, In a way that is more, be more caters to cloud native ways of building and delivering software. I think if you look at a lot of the vendors on the space, are I wouldn't say they're like, stuck in waterfall, but they are, they have, there are tools that were created 10, 15, 20 years ago.

And I feel there's definitely an opportunity for us to, go into that space. And also now with ai. Is obviously something that, I think, is not, just a buzzword, it's also something that we have to relate to both in the product and with our people adopting ai, how we can help them, from a testing perspective.

And that's also something that we wanna, you know, cater to. 

[00:20:57] Jay: You mentioned not competing with tools companies. Are there other competitors that are doing what you're doing right now? 

[00:21:06] Ole: There are definitely, the competitors that we we have a couple of competitors. One is the CICD tools where people say, well, I can just run my tests in GitHub actions.

That's an easy, easier argument for us because those are not built for testing ultimately, and they have shortcomings when, it comes to running tests scale, and maybe some of the things I outlined earlier. The others are, the cloud execution vendors like browser stack sauce labs. Lambda tests, blaze meter.

These are tools that were kind of. A, arrived when, people couldn't, didn't have their own infrastructure for running tests, and there was a need to write like browsers, like run or run across multiple browsers, multiple devices. I think today with Kubernetes that the need to pay for that infrastructure is not.

There anymore, and people have very capable in Kubernetes, gives people a very cap, capable infrastructure to run tests at scale. Also, the need to run across multiple browsers, et cetera, is something that you can do very well now with playwright in Kubernetes. So the, 

it's really the only area where we kind of today fall short is like iOS device testing.

So if people need to. You know, run stuff on an Apple device, for example.

But even Android devices can be simulated now in Kubernetes. something that we can do with Testkube. So we can do quite a lot,that you would previously have to outsource. To a cloud vendor, which then in our case, since we don't charge for usage, right?

So you can run as many tests as you want and as many, as much as you want. In parallel, it's your infrastructure, so you can use it as you want. And the, the models that you see the cloud vendors using are very geared to how many tests you can run at a time or in parallel, et cetera, et cetera, and all that goes away.

That's a, a big advantage for us. 

[00:22:49] Jay: All right. Final question. It all makes sense. This was great. I, I hope we can stay pals and, do 50 of these shows. 'cause there's so many things that I wanna ask you that I always run outta time. So, I have one final question. Non-business related, non-testkube related, non, you know, company related, et cetera.

Just about ole if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be? 

[00:23:15] Ole: If I could do anything on Earth, and I know I play, I do a jazz guitar set at the Village Vanguard in New York. 

[00:23:24] Jay: I mean. Thanks. You can't fail. So that's yours. I've never, that's a first.

I've never heard of jazz, music, anything. That's fantastic. All right, well,

[00:23:33] Ole: thank you.

[00:23:34] Jay: Uh, I love that answer. All right. Well, if people wanna reach out to you directly to hear something they heard today, how do they do that? And then how do they find out more about Testkube if they wanna do that as well? 

[00:23:43] Ole: reach out to me on, on LinkedIn, or just ole@testkube.io.

Or just go to our website, Testkube io. Sign up to our Slack channel. Can GitHub, you can find us in a bunch of Testkube related places. 

[00:23:55] Jay: Testkube related places. All right, Ole, you're awesome. thank you for all the, work you've done in the community. you know, I, think I've still blown my mind that you, were the founder of SoapUI.

I did not know that. So this is great. I, I think I may have known that at some point. It just blew my mind back then, so much that I forgot too. But, thank you for everything you've done. Keep up the good work. I love the team you've built so far. I know, I, I've been interacting with those guys. Uh, I, I firmly believe.

Great leaders and great founders, build great teams, and it feels like you've done that. So congratulations on that. Keep up the great work. we wish you nothing but success and we'll follow your story along the way. Thanks for being on today, and I'll talk to you soon. All right. 

[00:24:31] Ole: Thanks so much, Jay, for having me.

[00:24:33] Jay: Thanks Ole. Yeah. 

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