E15 Building a cloud unicorn for developers with Digital Ocean co-founder Moisey Uretzky

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Moisey Uretzky,  co-founder of Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure unicorn built for developers and headquartered in New York City. In this episode we journal the founder journey from getting into Techstars to scaling the company with venture debt to a recent unicorn valuation. 

00:00 Setting the scene 

03:55 The Uretzky family 

05:22 Roots of intellectual curiosity 

07:15 Mathematics and first principles thinking 

09:18 Startups before Digital Ocean 

14:16 Finding co-founders on Craigslist 

19:16 Digital Ocean MVP 

23:12 First major Product Iteration: 5$ SSD Plan 

29:36 Getting into Techstars 

32:35 Raising the Seed from IA Ventures 

37:19 Raising the Series A from a16z 

42:28 Using venture debt to scale up 

47:19 Scaling up Digital Ocean 

54:22 Competition with big tech cloud providers 

59:00 Running Digital Ocean during the Corona pandemic