From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what is the beginning of Torc. How much funding did Frank put in?

Michael Morris: That was an important piece for me. Through my experiences at Appirio and Topcoder, I knew about the effort it takes to fundraise. I was concerned about it. I didn’t want to spend all my time constantly fundraising. I just wanted to build something and focus on that. The fact that they were private equity was a little bit of a different structure. I don’t see myself going to somebody else. We had a commitment for a large level of funding, but we’ve only taken $5 million.

There’s also another partner in there – Rob Biederman for Asymmetric Ventures. Rob is an LP in that deal. He gave about 25% of the funding. We have an agreement that, as we need more capital, it’ll come from the two of them. That was very appealing to me. I can focus on building a sound business and not have to do dramatic dancing to get the next set of funding. I really wanted to focus on the longer-term building of a strong business. They gave me the opportunity to do that. We raised the initial $5 million and we’re off. It took us a few months to get the original platform built.

If you’re a software developer and you want to grow a career as a freelancer, we’re the place to go. We’ll help you figure out how good you are today. We’ll help assess your current skills. We will help you build an amazing profile that takes into account the things that you say you’re good at. It takes into account the things that you’ve proven to be good at. Everything is in the cloud. I can pull a year’s worth of your GitHub history and show what you’ve been doing. Then we built and acquired tooling around developer productivity. I call it Fitbit for developers.

The whole concept of developer productivity is something that we feel strongly about. The whole idea is to identify those people on your project team that get stuff done at a significant level. That is not always the person who takes the best test or graduates number one in their class. That’s what I wanted to do – build a platform to help individuals improve their careers dramatically. That starts with understanding where you are in your career and how good you are in your discipline.

As a developer comes on to our platform, we give them these tools and it gives them a complete assessment of where they’re spending their time versus other people. How much time do they spend coding versus reading code, editing code, and fixing bugs? Which files are you spending most of your time on? It’s all about giving this data to a developer to help them become more productive.

The key thing about it is, this is data for them. This is not data to track. Just like I use my Apple Watch to track my movements, they can choose to share that data if they’re proud of something. The whole idea is how do we give developers the tools whether it’s to find educational opportunities or opportunities to improve the way their work. That’s what we are setting out to do for the developers.

On the commercial side, it’s very simple. If you want to get access to freelance developer talent, you come to Torc. We focus primarily on cloud-native technologies. If you want to get a cloud-native technology developer, designer, or architect, we’ll give you somebody that’s been vetted and ready to go and assign them to your team. You can work with them as a freelancer. If a company wants to hire that resource over time with a contract-to-hire, we have that model as well. It’s meant to be a low-friction model for enterprises to get access to freelance talent. We are global and remote.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc
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