Metronome was acquired by Stripe yesterday, and I wanted to share a thank you to the founders who built it.
I have known Scott Woody since 2010, when we shared an office in downtown Palo Alto during my early days as a first-time CEO. He has always been the same person: thoughtful, slow talking, extremely technical, and uninterested in theatrics. Our meetings were rarely just strategy. We talked a lot about being dads while trying to build something hard. I saw how much he carried and how carefully he balanced it. Watching him grow from the early CTO into a strong CEO, without changing who he is, has been great to see. And beyond all that, I just like Scott. He is easy to root for.
My relationship with Kevin Liu is different. I met him through Vladimir Novakovski, our CTO at Euclid (acquired by WeWork). He had built something before but was still early in his founder journey and thinking about his next swing. We were both figuring out our paths as founders, just at different stages. I was deep in the Euclid grind, so most of our conversations were trading lessons about what building feels like. He showed up with three times the normal amount of nervous energy, the good kind. He becomes an expert in whatever he touches and has more hobbies than anyone I know. He also makes friends everywhere. A one hour coffee with him easily turns into a long friendship. Over time he became one of my good friends and one of my core fishing partners. Last year we went to Louisiana chasing tuna and redfish for a weekend, plus a food tour because Kevin is always the foodie. My kids now call him “Mushroom Guy” because after one Delta trip he stopped by our house and started hunting for mushrooms in the open space behind us. Very on brand.
As for what I saw early, it was not a deep thesis about the market, but I did understand one thing that was not widely appreciated. Usage based billing, if done correctly, was going to be a hard technical problem. The existing tools were built for a different era. They were not designed for real time event ingestion, correctness, or the reliability companies would need. I did not know how central it would become, but I knew it would take a different kind of engineering effort. Any real understanding I have of this space came from watching them build it.
They understood the real challenge. Usage based billing was not a UI problem or an invoicing workflow. It was a distributed systems problem. They built a reliable metering pipeline that earlier billing systems were not designed to handle.
None of this happened with just two people. The team behind Metronome put in the work to build something this ambitious and technically demanding.
To both of them, thank you for letting me be a small part of this. And Kevin, thanks for the fishing trips, the mushroom hunting, and the friendship that had nothing to do with the investment but means a lot to me. Grateful I got to be along for the ride.