From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the developer community now?

Michael Morris: It’s about 2,600 people. We’re still getting off the ground. Out of that, about 500 are vetted. These are people who have gone through our assessment process, built their profiles, linked up their GitHub accounts, and installed and started using our productivity tool.

Sramana Mitra: You have enterprise customers already?

Michael Morris: We’ve got about 10 customers. We are completely in bootstrapped mode. Some of our clients are a couple of Silicon Valley startups that need tech talent. We have companies in Canada through our network. Our first client was NASA through relationships that I’ve had previously. We started with them in February of 2022.

Sramana Mitra: You have significant revenue already from this community?

Michael Morris: We’ll be about $5 million in the first year.

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned that you recommend to the community what courses to take and what certifications to get. How do you determine that?

Michael Morris: We’re hyper-focused on the cloud-native platforms – AWS, GCP, and Azure. When you come into Torc and set up your profile, you hook up your GitHub. We see your past 12 months of activity. You take some technology assessments. We can quickly identify areas of improvement. It can be a course, a certification, or a project most likely. We’re building a lot of that stuff ourselves. Some of those things are open source work that we either need or need to be done but we’ll identify pieces of work that can help train you up in that technology. We have a talented success team. It’s the same concept as customer success except it’s for the talent.

Sramana Mitra: Are you acquiring training content from other companies?

Michael Morris: There are many companies that are experts at training like Udemy and Coursera. There’s one platform that we’re working on. We’re connected with their Head of Learning and Development. They have a really sleek simulator where you can get in and do project work very quickly. Those are the opportunities we are looking for. We have a community and we’re interested in getting them trained. If we can partner with some of these platform companies and get them to sponsor our learning, that’s where I want to go.

Sramana Mitra: If you work with a Coursera or Udemy, what is the business model?

Michael Morris: We don’t make money on that. I see that there are three phases of a developer’s career. There’s the learn phase, an earn phase, and a return phase. The learn phase is something that we will constantly invest in. Our productivity tooling is about how we identify what areas you can focus on to learn more.

The earn phase is where we make money. We put freelancers out and we take a piece of the freelancing.

The return phase is about mentoring. From the very first job I’ve ever gotten, I understood the value of a mentor. I understand the value of mentors and that you should have multiple. We provide an opportunity for our members to be mentors to other members. We will compensate them for that. People want to do it. Developers love nothing more than sharing their knowledge with other developers. They’re proud of that. We feel strongly about that.

Every person that gets placed on the Torc platform will get a minimum of four hours of mentoring per week. Often it’s platform engineering and DevOps help. Sometimes it’s specific technology help. Sometimes, it’s just teaching them how to work in an environment. Not everybody knows that they should ask for a one-on-one meeting with their supervisors. Not everybody knows how to approach that meeting. Even little things like how you communicate in a Slack channel.

Sramana Mitra: Soft skills so to speak.

Michael Morris: Absolutely. At some point, we’ll probably build an offering around that. Right now, it’s just part of the platform.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc
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