Welcome to The Business Philosopher podcast! I'm your host, Bhavesh Naik, and our guest today is Chris Bach. Chris is originally from Copenhagen, Denmark, and has spent the last decade in Silicon Valley pioneering a new architecture for building sites, stores, and apps for the web. Today, this new architecture is used by the majority of enterprises.
The company he co-founded to do this, Netlify, has almost 5 million businesses and developers that run over 35 million sites, stores, and apps. Chris is very engaged in the web community and sits on a number of advisory and executive boards, besides being an avid angel investor. I'm pleased to have him on this podcast to share his insights and journey.
The Story of Netlify
Chris shared the origins of Netlify, which started when he was chief digital officer at an agency. His co-founder reached out with the notion that the underlying architecture of web solutions, whether Drupal, WordPress, Sitecore or other enterprise and consumer-oriented platforms, was due for a change.
To understand what Netlify is doing, it's important to understand where the web was coming from. It was built on monoliths - when you visit a website, you are hitting a single server that builds a version of that site for you and sends it back. This monolithic architecture houses the presentation layer (what you see and interact with), the content management system, and all the technical components like template engines, in one big program that has to run for every visitor.
While this was smart enough for the early social Internet, allowing real-time updates, it has some major drawbacks:
It's a big bottleneck, with lots of code running exposed, making it insecure.
It's not very fast, as it has to compute for every visitor.
Visitors have to make a round trip to that single origin server, no matter where they are located.
The web started being challenged by walled gardens and apps.
As Chris recounted:
"I like to tell the story of Steve Jobs. When he first presented the iPhone. It was on a PDF. And all those icons that we today know, our Instagram and everything else, they were just shortcuts to websites. So the notion of having an app didn't exist."
It was only when it became clear that pulling in the UI every time you turned a page wasn't going to scale that the app model emerged. Pre-building the application and just pulling in updates as needed was a better approach for mobile performance. But this led to the rise of the App Store, threatening the open web.
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Decoupling the Web with Netlify's New Architecture
Netlify's insight was to apply the same model of pre-building used for mobile apps to the web itself. Decouple the presentation layer from the backend, so the shell of the website can be built independently of the business logic and content it needs to pull in.
Instead of building a version of a website for every visitor, it could be pre-built. And because it's pre-built, you can have multiple points of origin all over the globe, making it much faster (no need to compute on the fly) and "always next door" to the visitor. This approach is also:
Much more scalable, as you don't have to build for every single visitor.
More secure, as the build takes place on the developer's machine rather than being exposed to the world.
Essentially, Netlify wanted to provide the infrastructure to deploy this new decoupled web architecture and make it viable - the "glue" to bring together the UI layer with content, commerce, and other components into a full experience.
When they launched in 2015, the ecosystem for this new architecture was lacking. Frontend developers couldn't build a headless commerce site if there were no headless commerce providers. And with the decoupling, there needed to be a way for the different services to talk to each other.
While Netlify couldn't build out the whole ecosystem, they could provide the platform. Give developers the automation to stitch together whatever build tools, frontend frameworks, and APIs they wanted to use, and deploy that to a global application delivery network. Then as the ecosystem evolved, the category would have a chance to really take off.
Driving Adoption of the Jamstack
While Netlify didn't invent all the individual parts, they formalized and evangelized an architecture for decoupling the web, which they called the Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup).
"What we did was not really invent those individual parts, but more sort of make a line around it, draw a circle around and saying, hey, combined this will collect them...To a new way of building. And if we put effort and focus onto this, it could become everything."
In the early days, it was about getting the Jamstack into developers' toolbelts. Provide a great developer experience, make the deployment "magic moment" really quick, and get rapid adoption that could drive the ecosystem. Monetization would come later, once there was a mature set of services to build full enterprise applications.
As Chris described it, the Jamstack is now becoming the default for web development:
"Gartner last January was saying that 70% of all enterprises would be building with this architecture last year. I think the number is probably closer to 90% now. So it's really becoming default."
Expanding with Enterprise Needs
With the category now proven out, Netlify is expanding its platform to solve emerging needs, especially around the enterprise.
While the Jamstack makes it easy to adopt new services, enterprises have lots of existing systems that aren't going away overnight. They need to be able to plugin legacy tools as well, to have a bridge during the transition.
Netlify has made acquisitions to add an integration and orchestration layer to their platform, allowing enterprises to wrap APIs around legacy systems, put them behind an extensible caching layer, and make them compatible with the Jamstack. So enterprises can manage a brownfield migration, not just start over with a greenfield deployment.
The other big shift is how AI is changing the web development lifecycle. Chris sees AI as still early, but something companies have to start adopting to stay competitive:
"AI is imagine where the car was a year and a half after it was introduced. We're still driving on steam...However, I don't believe that we've seen any version of it that's going to stay like it's changing so fast as a company...The difference it makes in driving efficiency is too big for you to not lean in at the same time, as I just said, it's impossible to pick, right."
Netlify wants to be the infrastructure layer that lets enterprises experiment with different AI tools and approaches, while maintaining flexibility:
"So I think what Netlify can help with is to make sure that you can choose something and then discontinue it again. Like we just provide the plumbing, the infrastructure, the workflows...It's to provide you with the absolute flexibility as an enterprise to say, well, I want to choose this and I want to choose that and so on."
The Philosophy Driving Netlify
I love to ask guests what drives them - what makes them excited to do the work they do. For Chris, it comes down to three things:
Being on a mission to change the status quo
Constantly learning and evolving
Feeding off the energy of passionate people solving problems
As he put it:
"I'm happy when I learn something new. I'm happy when I'm building, like, hey, we're out there changing the status quo...And then I feed off the energy of other people. Like, as a person, right. I surround myself with passionate, enthusiastic people."
This mission-driven approach, balanced with self-awareness, has guided Chris's journey with Netlify. From the original insight about decoupling the web, through evangelizing the Jamstack architecture, to now empowering enterprises to adopt this model, he is energized by the potential for fundamentally improving how web experiences are delivered.
Key Takeaways
From this fascinating conversation, some of my key takeaways are:
Decoupling the frontend from the backend is enabling a new architecture for building web sites and apps, driven by pre-building, global delivery, and composability
Netlify is providing the platform to automate deployment and management of this decoupled architecture
Adoption is now spreading from early developer excitement to digital agencies and enterprise IT
Integrating with existing systems and providing flexibility to experiment with new technologies like AI is becoming critical for enterprise adoption
Having a mission that gets you excited, surrounds you with passionate people, and keeps you learning is key to sustaining as a founder
A huge thank you to Chris for coming on the show and sharing his story and business philosophy. If you want to learn more about Netlify and the future of web architecture, check out netlify.com. And if you want to connect with Chris, you can find him on LinkedIn.
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