Incredibuild acquires Garden: A big enough vision to matter

As a former developer myself, I know that it isn’t uncommon for developers to spend time, an inordinate amount of it, on things that didn’t have anything to do with building the product that you’ve been hired for. Often, this work was boring and repetitive, involving plumbing tasks that had to be redone each time a new environment, tool, cloud, configuration, or package was required for the developer’s project.

The founders of Garden, Jon Edvald, Eythor Magnusson, and Thorarinn Sigurdsson, clearly had different ideas. When we first met, their enthusiasm, energy, and passion for changing the status quo was pretty infectious. Equally importantly, they channeled that energy into building Garden into a platform that helps developers spin up production-like environments for development, testing, and continuous integration (CI) on demand. It enables teams to use the same configuration and workflows for every stage of software delivery–and dramatically speeds up builds and test runs via smart caching.

We, at Sorenson Capital, have been fortunate to have been part of an amazing journey nurturing the Garden that the founders started. Culminating in Incredibuild acquiring the company recently.

In reflecting on Garden’s journey, there are a few standout characteristics of Garden and its founding team that we believe made them successful.

Obsessing over the user experience

If there was one constant theme in any 1:1, meeting, or board update, it was an obsession with the user experience. In the early days, I recall Jon, Eythor, and Thorarinn spending almost entire board meetings articulating their vision for the ideal user experience and how they were meticulously executing on it. This relentless focus on user experience helped them win customers like Starbucks while still being an early entrant in a new category.

Having a big enough vision to matter

More often than not, people who obsess over details miss the big picture. That’s what one might assume from my earlier characterization of the Garden team, but that was quite the opposite. Jon is that rare breed of human who can simultaneously execute on the intricate details of the product functionality, understand the end-user experience, and identify key market gaps – all while positioning Garden to seize these opportunities, individually and as a whole.

Tell a great story

It’s one thing to be able to have a big vision and quite another to be able to successfully convey it to the world. Quite a few early-stage founders’ visions are overlooked because they struggle to clearly connect the dots between the current state of the world and the world as they envision it. What is so incredible about the Garden team is their ability to sell the world on their big bold vision for a new way–a way that would reduce developer toil on unnecessary tooling work. It is this vision that they hope to fully realize when working with the incredible team at Incredibuild!

In closing, some say, VCs do a lot of pattern-matching. I don’t know about you, but these patterns are totally worth matching in my world!