(upbeat music)
<v ->Stopwatch is a high growth venture back startup,</v>
specializing in B2B software for enterprise solutions.
<v ->Stopwatch is really designed to help big CPGs,</v>
consumer package goods companies,
solve problems in the data and the analytics space.
<v ->As a small company, we have to be nimble,</v>
and we have to use the tools that allow us to be nimble.
<v ->From a startup perspective,</v>
if we're not innovating, then we're dying.
And so by leveraging the suite of systems
that Microsoft has built,
we're able to more concentrate on solving problems.
<v ->From the very beginning,</v>
Stopwatch has been a digital native company.
We've been in the cloud from day one.
When the pandemic hit, we went full remote.
Teams is a huge part of our collaboration.
All the integrations that it provides
with things like Whiteboard, like our DevOps work items
for sprint planning, pipelines, and our code repositories.
So our Git pull requests and all that
are integrated through our Teams as well.
So having all that together in one place
and keep things moving was huge for us.
<v ->Visual Studio 2022 allows us to integrate into everything</v>
from our hosting environments, into our code repositories,
into our Agile repositories, all from within one tool.
It helps us feel bigger than we are.
Being able to use Live Share
from a collaboration standpoint is really huge.
When you bring new people in,
you have to learn the code base.
And being able to sit potentially hundreds of miles apart
and look at the same piece of code together,
definitely helps get everyone on the same page.
(upbeat music)
<v ->The .NET framework</v>
enabled pretty much all of our stack, front to back.
We have our data access layer, built in .NET,
our web APIs and web services are built in .NET.
And the fact that we can deploy that
onto different environments and containers
really helps with our agility there.
<v ->Being able to leverage Open Source Tools</v>
also allows us to operate faster
and helps us get back to where we really need to be,
and that is solving problems.
<v ->We needed an easy way</v>
to scale our Kubernetes clusters up and down.
So KEDA was a natural fit.
Our Kubernetes cluster can scale from zero workers,
where we pay nothing, all the way up,
limitless scale and where we can run as many jobs
as we want to.
<v ->We use PowerShell</v>
whenever we're deploying our imports engine.
We also use PowerShell to interact with Power BI.
We have scripts that are part of our build pipelines
and are part of our data refresh pipelines.
We're able to execute seamlessly.
<v ->I don't think</v>
there have been many JavaScript-based projects
that I've started in the last 10 years
that haven't used Typescript.
<v ->Typescript definitely has allowed me</v>
to actually be able to more rapidly work on the front end.
<v ->That strategic longevity</v>
is definitely an important piece of it,
because if you're not building your technology
with things that are gonna scale,
and aren't gonna continue to innovate
and remain relevant, gonna become stale.
<v ->There's a million things that can go wrong in startup.</v>
And the one thing that I can't afford to go wrong
is that our technology actually fails
or breaches or has any sort of issues.
We've gotta have all our bets hedged.
And Microsoft has just been never a question
in terms of whether or not we could be confident
in taking that bet.
(upbeat music)