TL;DR: Sandeep previously worked at Google and Stripe, and founded a YC startup that became one of Fern’s first customers. In November, he joined Fern as an engineer. Learn about the feature he shipped on his first day and his thoughts on why customer perspective matters when building developer tools.
I met the Fern team at a Y Combinator offsite in 2023. At the time, I was CTO at Mercoa, and we needed great SDKs but didn't have the bandwidth to build them. Fern was the solution.
Two months ago, I joined Fern as an engineer, building the product I once used as a customer.
How my startup became a Fern customer
I co-founded Mercoa, a fintech startup that went through YC. We had a complex bill payment API that needed to work across multiple programming languages. Developer experience wasn't just a nice-to-have—it was one of the main reasons customers chose us over competitors or building in-house. Great SDKs would let us compete with much larger companies.
But we didn't have the engineering resources to build and maintain them ourselves. I spent days trying to get SDK generation to work, and couldn't find anything open source that actually did. From my time at Stripe and Google, I knew that large companies staffed whole teams to solve this problem. It didn't seem like something a small startup like Mercoa could do on its own.
Then, at the first night of the YC offsite, I ran into the Fern team talking about generating SDKs. My first question: how soon can Mercoa use this? They migrated us over a weekend, and we became happy customers immediately. When Fern later launched their documentation product, Mercoa was again one of the first to adopt it. Having our API definition natively integrated into our docs, SDKs, and backend from a single source of truth was very powerful.
Making the jump
As a customer, I really liked the Fern product and how fast it was improving and evolving. When Deep reached out about a potential role at Fern, it seemed like a great fit. I was already recommending Fern to everyone I knew building APIs, so the transition to employee wasn't that jarring.
As I thought about whether to make the jump, I kept coming back to the problems Fern solved: generating SDKs across multiple languages without staffing a whole team; keeping docs in sync with your API; and giving developers a polished experience from day one. And I only saw this market getting bigger—as APIs become more mainstream, just shipping an OpenAPI spec and some basic docs wasn’t going to cut it. I knew teams would need quality SDKs and documentation to effectively compete.
I also looked at what strengths I could bring. At Google Cloud, I worked on the DevRel team, where we scaled developer experiences from early-stage to industry-leading. I'd also built Kbee, a product that turned Google Drive folders into a fast, searchable wiki—a similar technical problem space to Fern Docs. On top of all that, I knew from experience that the Fern team ships fast and genuinely cares about customers. I saw the opportunity to help scale Fern as more teams adopted it, and I was excited for that challenge.
Customer perspective, day one
Two months in, everything I believed about Fern as a customer has held up. I carry that customer perspective into every feature I ship. I know just how important docs and SDKs are—it's the first place new customers go to evaluate the product, and where existing customers go to solve problems they're having.They might not seem like critical infrastructure to everyone, but for the teams responsible, they absolutely are.
On my first day, I added a progress bar to fern docs dev, the command Fern Docs customers use to preview their documentation locally before publishing. Previously, it wasn’t clear a docs bundle was being downloaded, and there was no indication of progress or time to completion. Small change, but customers noticed. Details matter.
It's the kind of feature that makes sense when you've been on the other side and remember what it was like to be the customer who just wanted to ship.
Looking ahead
One of my focuses now is docs performance at scale. As Mercoa grew, we pushed the limits of what docs could handle, and now I get to work on making sure Fern performs beautifully for teams with large, complex APIs.
Looking ahead, I'm excited about an improved self-service docs workflow we're building. Right now, you have to contact sales to go live with Fern documentation, but we want you to be able to create or migrate your docs site in production in less than five minutes.
If building developer tools you'd want to use yourself sounds appealing, we're hiring.
