About this episode

The episode discusses Michael Drogalis's journey of building a B2B software company alone and the lessons learned along the way.

When people think about starting a software company, they usually imagine raising venture capital, hiring engineers, and growing a team as quickly as possible. Michael Drogalis chose a different path. After helping build technology in the Kafka ecosystem, founding a startup that was ultimately acquired by Confluent, and leading product for stream processing, he walked away from big tech to see if one person could build a serious B2B software company. * The result became ShadowTraffic , a product that helps engineering teams generate realistic production traffic for testing, demos, and development. Data Engineering Central is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. In this conversation, we talk about much more than streaming systems. We discuss why most engineers underestimate the importance of understanding customers, how AI is changing software development without replacing experienced engineers, what it takes to market technical products, and why writing publicly can become one of the biggest accelerators of your career. If you’ve ever considered building your own product, becoming a solopreneur, or…

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