Getting to Resend (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week Adam is joined by Zeno Rocha — the creator of the beloved Dracula theme and Co-founder and CEO of Resend. They discuss his personal journey and the challenges of balancing work and family life, how becoming a parent has given him new perspectives and influenced his decision to start his own company, the role of citizenship and immigration in his journey, how he prepared for the Y Combinator interview, meeting Paul Graham, the challenges of sending email, and the future of Resend and the possibility of a Series A round.

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Sponsors:

• FireHydrant – The alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules. No need to configure your services or do wonky work-arounds. Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. But here’s the game-changer…Signals natively integrates with FireHydrant’s full incident management suite, so as soon as you’re alerted you can seamlessly kickoff and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com/signals
• Cloudflare – Cloudflare’s Developer Week is happening April 1-5, 2024. Also you can hang with Adam and the rest of the folks at Cloudflare at the Cloudflare offices in Austin, TX on Wednesday, April 3rd at 5:30pm — register here.
• Synadia – Take NATS to the next level via a global, multi-cloud, multi-geo and extensible service, fully managed by Synadia. They take care of all the infrastructure, management, monitoring, and maintenance for you so you can focus on building exceptional distributed applications.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Zeno Rocha – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Resend.com
• Dracula Theme
• React Email
• Changelog Interviews #248: Open source lessons learned
• Changelog Interviews #405: It’s OK to make money from your open source

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapter

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: FireHydrant (00:01:36)

https://firehydrant.com/signals

3. Start the show! (00:04:11)

4. Zeno or Zeno? (00:04:50)

5. Let's get personal (00:07:23)

6. Enjoy the micro moments (00:14:34)

7. Sponsor: Cloudflare (00:21:39)

https://www.cloudflare.com/developerweek

8. Starting Resend (00:24:49)

9. Citizenship and Immigration (00:29:25)

10. The YC interview (00:34:23)

11. A glimpse into Zeno's conviction (00:37:40)

12. Explaining Resend (00:42:58)

13. YC companies by default (00:45:23)

14. Sponsor: Synadia (00:48:55)

https://www.synadia.com/changelog

15. Funding Resend (00:52:24)

16. When is your A round? (01:02:53)

17. Big fans of Silicon Valley!! (01:07:24)

18. Season 2 of Resend (01:15:33)

19. How good is Resend? (01:19:21)

20. The infrastructure of Resend (01:22:14)

21. What's next? (01:25:51)

22. Wrapping up (01:29:51)

23. Go hug someone. (01:32:10)