Introducing Kevin Lin, Founder and CEO of Dendron

Sara:

I'm Sara Lindquist from FUSE. We're an early-stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio companies in the FUSE family to date.

Today, you'll hear from Kevin Lin, Founder and CEO of Dendron. Join us as we fire through a few topics about the business, the team's journey this far, and how Kevin - after having taken over 20,000 notes during his career as a developer - decided it was time to build a new method of knowledge management. 

Let's get started!

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Sara:

Well, appreciate you taking the time, Kevin. It's awesome to be with you!

Kevin:

Thanks, Sara. It's nice to talk to you, too.

Sara:

I'm excited for you to share a bit about your story. So to get things started, could you share a quick overview of what Dendron is and how it serves customers today?

Kevin:

Yeah. At Dendron, we help humans work with any amount of knowledge, that is, organize it, reference it, and make use of it. A way of thinking about us is, most note-taking tools, they focus on helping people get notes in. But past a certain threshold, it's hard to get that information back out again. So at Dendron, we also help you get your notes in, but our focus is on making sure that you can always get them back out when you need it, regardless of how much information that you have. The insight here is that organizing knowledge takes work, and instead of trying to hide it or sugarcoat that, we give you the tools to be able to do it at scale. The way that we do this is we borrow a lot from programming languages and develop a tooling which is able to do this with developers, helping them organize millions of lines of code. We do that, but with general knowledge instead.

Sara:

And going back in time a little bit, when was that first "aha moment" you had that you knew you needed to build this?

Kevin:

For Dendron, it came out of my own experience as a software engineer. I used to work at AWS and with cloud computing. Especially, even if you just look at AWS alone, the landscape changes almost on a daily basis. AWS now has over 200 different services. Every service has sub-services and different ways of working with it and integrating with it. I knew at the very beginning of my career that there's no way that I could keep up with any of it if I just try to hold it in my head. And so the solution was, how could I externalize this information in a way that I could make use of it again later? And so the past decade, essentially, I've been trying to find a tool or find a methodology for myself to make this work for me.

Sara:

Right. And so then finally, one day, you said, "Oh, heck with it, I'll build it myself!"

Kevin:

Yeah, essentially. It's not for the lack of trying. I think I've gone with every single note-taking tool, knowledge base, or platform that you can think of.

Sara:

Yeah. And Kevin, you've started this adventure as a sole entrepreneur, and started to grow the company on your own, and have now started assembling a great team around you. So early team days, what's one word that you'd use to describe your culture, and why do you think that you're uniquely set apart to build this?

Kevin:

So one word, out of all the words, I think something that applies pretty well to the Dendron team is working async first. What I mean by this is nowadays, we're all in a global lockdown, and a lot of companies, most companies are doing remote and going towards remote work. When they say remote, it means that you can work anywhere in the world as long as you stick to an East Coast time zone. That's not what we mean at Dendron. We are both remote and async. And by async, our team is globally distributed. We have people working at -08:00 UTC to +09:00 UTC. There's no way we can make this work synchronously. In a given week, we have one, one-hour meeting in which we do all our planning and all our synchronous talks, but everything else happens asynchronously through Discord and through using Dendron. The whole value prop as a company, as a tool, is that we can externalize your knowledge in such a way that people can reference it without having another person there. And so what's really awesome about this is that we are dogfooding our product, and we have to prove this value proposition to ourselves every single day because that's how our company runs.

Sara:

Well, that's right, and it's living and breathing your customer's experience each and every day. So I love that, and I think your team is certainly the team to build this.

So the next question I have for you is about the startup journey in general, which is obviously hard work, a lot of asynchronous hours spent together, and working around the clock to serve your customers. So what keeps you going, especially at moments where others, probably, would've called it quits? What really gets you up every day in the morning and continues to fuel that conviction that you need to build Dendron?

Kevin:

Yeah. I mean, definitely, there are highs, lows, and everything in between. I think the thing that makes this possible and sustainable long-term is that I can't really think of anything else I would rather be doing. My idea about building Dendron, working on Dendron, it's less about building a company, but more, if I look at how I would want to spend my time, I would want to spend it building something I'm super passionate about and with a team of people that I respect. And so working on Dendron, working with the Dendron team, that checks all the boxes for me. So even though it might be hard sometimes, I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing with my time right now.

Sara:

Well, that's awesome. Thank you for building what you're building. And so in closing here, one final question. What right now do you need more of? How can any listeners get involved or help?

Kevin:

Oh, we can use more of everything, being a startup.

Sara:

Good answer.

Kevin:

Some specifics, one, we're always looking for users to give Dendron a try, especially if you're already using VS Code. You can download us by looking for Dendron in the Extension Marketplace. It's a single click, and you are ready to go. And if you're just interested in geeking out about knowledge management, we have a Discord community of over a thousand users. They are some of the most knowledgeable in this intersection between developers who like to take notes and having various methodologies of doing it. And specifically, right now, I'm just going to sneak in a whole bunch of asks in this last question.

Sara:

Good, good. Go for it. This is the time to do so!

Kevin:

Yeah. So our current focus is Dendron works great for individuals, but we're looking at easier ways of integrating Dendron with the tools that you already use. So specifically, we have, right now, deeper integrations with GitHub Issues, Airtable, and Google Docs. A lot of teams use it for their daily workflows, and we do so as well in Dendron. So if you use these tools at work, and want to work with them inside VS Code using markdown, using plain text, and having your own copies of everything, we're currently offering dedicated support for these integrations in our private beta. There's going to be a link that I'll be sharing with Sara that people will have access to [see this link below!], And if you're interested in this, please do sign up.

Sara:

Go, Team Dendron! Everyone, signup, start using the product and join this awesome team. That sounds great, Kevin. Thank you so much for being here and sharing a bit about your story.

Kevin:

Happy to. Thank you, Sara.

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Sara:

Calling all developers, go give Dendron a try and get involved in the GitHub community. And feel free to reach out to us at FUSE if you have any interest in getting directly involved with Kevin and the team. Thanks for listening and see you next time!

Sign up for Dendron’s Google Doc Integration Beta: https://airtable.com/shrP1yKjIDPFU4wHN