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Sheridan is selling Fern so API companies get production SDKs and docs from one spec, instead of staffing a full team to maintain generators like the largest tech companies do.
Danny Sheridan is co-founder and chief executive of Fern, an API documentation and SDK company. He founded Fern with Deep Singhvi, who serves as chief technology officer.
Meeting at the University of Michigan
Sheridan and Singhvi met at the University of Michigan in 2015, according to a Bessemer Venture Partners interview. After graduation they spent years at Amazon and Palantir, where they saw internal SDK generation systems such as Smithy and Conjure up close.
Working on SDK Generators at Amazon
Those systems worked because large companies could staff dedicated teams for client libraries across languages. Most API companies instead relied on uneven open-source generators that needed manual fixes and missed features such as OAuth flows or streaming. Sheridan and Singhvi started Fern to sell that capability as a product, as they describe in the Bessemer interview.
Keeping Docs and SDKs on One Spec at Fern
Fern generates documentation sites, SDKs, and a CLI from an API specification so a change ships once across languages. Sheridan's public pitch is that developer experience for APIs should not require Amazon-scale tooling investment.
