Raw Day Inside a $16.5M Startup Building Enterprise Infrastructure [QEH8l3vEx4C]
In this episode, I go behind the scenes with the team at Nuon, a startup building a platform that enables software companies to deploy their applications directly into their customers’ own cloud environments through the Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model. Nuon was founded by solo founder Jon Morehouse and has raised $16.5M from investors including Mantis VC, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Uncork Capital and Redpoint Ventures. As enterprises adopt AI, they’re also becoming more protective of where their data lives. Rather than sending sensitive information into third-party software, more companies are asking vendors to bring their applications into the customer’s own cloud. Nuon believes this shift will fundamentally change how modern software is deployed. For many startups, the challenge is no longer just building great software, it’s deploying that software in a way that large enterprises are willing to trust. In many ways, deployment has become the bottleneck standing between enterprise customers and the technologies they’re trying to adopt. After spending four years building Nuon, Jon made the decision to open source the platform. The goal wasn’t just to make the technology publicly available. As Nuon became a more critical layer between software vendors and enterprise customers, the team believed trust and transparency would become just as important as the product itself. Their ambition isn’t just to build a product, but to help establish a common standard for how BYOC applications are built, deployed and operated. Inside this episode: - Why AI is creating new deployment challenges for enterprise software - Why Jon believes Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is becoming the next major deployment model - Inside Nuon’s hybrid culture - Inside Nuon’s daily engineering and product discussions - Why the team decided to open source Nuon - How Nuon’s first design partners helped shape the product - Jon Morehouse’s advice for founders building difficult companies As more software companies rethink where their products run, entirely new infrastructure categories are beginning to emerge. Nuon’s bet is that Bring Your Own Cloud will become a defining part of that shift. But how does a solo founder and a small, tight-knit team solve a problem that much of the software industry has avoided for years? Check out Nuon: Join my founder newsletter: Let’s connect: X: Instagram: LinkedIn: Episode Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:31 Inside Nuon's office 03:31 Interview with founder Jon Morehouse 05:26 Product Meeting 06:57 Will debrief 07:45 Interview with Mark Milligan 08:50 Visit from Gaurav Bhogale (Mantis VC) 10:00 Vercel outage 11:02 Interview with Jordan Acosta 13:40 Nuon's most defining moment 14:01 Jon's advice for founders