If You Build It, They Will Come – Honeycomb CEO Christine Yen

Christine Yen is not like other CEO’s. She’s an engineer, that co-founded a company that has gone onto become, not just a leader in an industry, but also a company that defined an industry category – Observability.

I have watched and admired the rise of Honeycomb from a very close vantage point. Formerly in my role at Dynatrace, who is also a leader in this observability space, I saw them quietly go about their business, without really ruffling any feathers. The Datadog’s, New Relic’s, AppDynamics, and Dynatracers of the world would end up in head to head battles. We’d be quick to jibe back about each other’s capabilities but Honeycomb seemed to be walking to the beat of it’s own drum.

It fascinated me to the point that I really wanted to know more.

In this podcast, I had a long sit down, with Christine Yen, the companies co-founder and CEO. We talked about the companies origin and original idea, early success, through the challenges with Go To Market, and being a female tech leader.

• Where did the name Honeycomb come from?
• From Facebook to start-up, how Christine and her co-founder got started.
• How defining the marketing and go to market strategy for Honeycomb has been harder than the tech.
• Coming up with a new industry category phrase from APM to Observability
• Being a female leader, in an industry that is predominately male.

Enjoy. I certainly did.