What to Think, Ep. 22: New Relic's bold second act

New Relic founder and chief executive Lew Cirne can’t help but write code in his free time. That’s how he came up with the software analytics company’s Insights service, which lets analysts monitor website and application usage.

And even though he’s head of an IPO-bound company, Cirne remains plenty active as a developer. Or at least that’s what he told VentureBeat editor-in-chief Dylan Tweney and staff writer Jordan Novet on this week’s What to Think podcast.

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“Just last Friday, I was running a query in Insights, and I wanted to answer a question I couldn’t in Insights,” he said. “I wanted to see how much revenue we were getting from customers who were using a certain programming language. So I coded up the feature over the weekend, and I checked it in this morning.”

That’s just the kind of executive Cirne is. He and others at the company come up with new capabilities, and he relies on top leaders to execute on the plans to make Insights common among business people and also increase adoption of the already widely used New Relic application-performance management service.

Even as he’s confident of the configuration in place at New Relic, he knows how challenging it is to pull off a second act. He talked about that and several other subjects on the podcast. He even gave a preview of the company’s second annual FutureStack conference in San Francisco on Oct. 8-9. (Hint: It involves OK Go, who will play at the conference’s kickoff party!) By the way, you can get 50 percent off beta tickets to the conference by going to the FutureStack website and registering with the promo code VentureBeat.

In addition to interviewing Cirne, Dylan and Jordan also talk about:

• The launch of iOS 8, including new keyboards and a smarter Siri
• The Alibaba IPO and its crazy implications for Yahoo
• GamesBeat’s Giancarlo Valdes’ impressions of the new Crescent Bay headset prototype from Oculus Rift

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Enjoy the show!