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YC Application S13

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Ronan Berder edited this page Oct 20, 2013 · 1 revision

Company name:

devo.ps

Company url, if any:

http://devo.ps

Phone number(s):

(+1) 415 320 0405, (+86) 13671943352

Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founders. (Instructions.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IMY_zduZI8&feature=youtu.be

YC usernames of all founders, including you, hunvreus, separated by spaces. (That'susernames, not given names: "bksmith," not "Bob Smith." If there are 3 founders, there should be 3 tokens in this answer.)

hunvreus makarawang balou

YC usernames of all founders, including you, hunvreus, who will live in the Bay Area January through March if we fund you. (Again, that's usernames, not given names.)

hunvreus makarawang balou

What is your company going to make?

A platform to build and manage your DevOps blueprint; basically, Github for DevOps.

With devo.ps you can deploy and manage your servers (on your AWS, Rackspace or Linode accounts, or your own machines), the services running on them (node.js, Varnish, CouchDB, PHP...), the applications deployed on this infrastructure and the best practices that come along (backup, deployment, automation, ...).

Ultimately we want to allow our users to easily share their DevOps strategies with others (through templates), integrate 3rd party services (Cloudkick, Loggly, Sendgrid...) and expose some of what they built to other team members (allowing for example the development team to easily backup an app, or update the code of the staging app).

For each founder, please list: YC username; name; age; year of graduation, school, degree and subject for each degree; email address; personal url, github url, facebook id, twitter id; employer and title (if any) at last job before this startup. Put unfinished degrees in parens. List the main contact first. Separate founders with blank lines. Put an asterisk before the name of anyone not able to move to the Bay Area.

  • Username: makarawang
  • Name: (Makara) Haoyu Wang
  • Age: 30
  • Year of graduation: N/A
  • School: N/A
  • Degrees: N/A
  • Email address: makara@devo.ps
  • URLS:
  • Last job: CTO at Wiredcraft

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved.

  • Ronan Berder (& Makara Wang): Forced into a difficult financial and professional situation by my previous employer, I bootstrapped Wiredcraft (with Makara) from Shanghai and grew it into a high quality, cutting edge development shop that builds strategies and solutions for CNN, the UN, the World Bank, governments...

  • Makara Wang (& Ronan Berder): Built the Southern Sudan Referendum registration and voting infrastructure, providing a secure and accurate workflow for Sudanese to vote on cutting the largest African country in half and publishing these results live online. http://wiredcraft.com/work/southern-sudan-referendum/index.html

  • Vincent Viallet: After going to China straight out of school, spearheaded, trained and managed the Operations Team of ChinaNetCloud (http://500.co/startup-profiles/chinanetcloud/), growing it from 2 to 30 staffs with 100+ customers having fully custom architectures.

Please tell us about the time you, hunvreus, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

End of last year, after 2 years of bootstrapping my previous company, Wiredcraft, I was left exhausted both physically and mentally. Overweight and struggling to cope with a busy schedule, I decided to drastically change my lifestyle. I switched to a strict paleo diet, waking up at 6:00 AM to be able to work out 4 to 6 times a week before work and gradually decreased my alcohol intake until completely losing interest in it.

10 months in, I'm in the best shape of my life, with more energy, patience, determination and focus than I ever had.

I consider this to be the greatest hack I was able to pull on my mind and body: this is the happiest and most productive I've ever been.

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

  • The three of us: the Humanitarian ID (http://humanitarianid.org/) combines an API and mobile applications, allowing humanitarian professionals to maintain a profile, and consume content targeted to their field. It also let them find complementary professionals around them, helping coordinate the response on the ground in case of crisis.

  • Me & Vincent: the BRTData platform (http://brtdata.org/) provides a dashboard for transportation indicators from various agencies (Embarq, SIBRT, IEA). We used Dropbox as the main storage backend (CSV for data sets and Markdown files for content), removing the need for a regular CMS. Becoming a partner is as easy as being invited to the Dropbox folder and starting to drop in your Excel spreadsheets.

  • The three of us have been running various events for years: Hacker News meetup (http://shanghaihn.org), Shanghai Open Source meetup (http://shanghaios.org), Drupal Tour (http://wiredcraft.github.com/drupal_tour/).

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

  • Ronan & Vincent (6.5 years): We met when working at a previous company where we were in charge of respectively Development and Operations.

  • Ronan/Vincent & Makara (5 years): Makara met me (Ronan), and later on my friend Vincent, when I recruited him at a company I was managing. We subsequently worked together at Wiredcraft until leaving it recently to found devo.ps.

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?

We've worked with all kind of clients, small to very large: CNN, UN, World Bank, Nvidia... Vincent has also worked on large infrastrcuturre projects for Paypal, Ferrari, Popcap Games...

A big part, or sometimes the whole part, of these projects was infrastructure/DevOps. And after years trying many approaches, nothing panned out as sustainable to handle it:

  1. A new project means you start with a blank slate. It is rare to be able to really effectively re-use what you've previously built,

  2. Most organization can't make the kind of investment it takes to put together a working strategy (automation, deployment, backups, orchestration...), even those who can have a very hard time scaling their staff (who spend most of their time putting out fires),

  3. It's very hard to keep a good overview of the whole strategy (lots of tools and parts spread on various levels),

  4. The barriers to entry for tools in that area are fairly high,

We're building something that allows our customers to;

  1. Lower the barriers to entry to DevOps strategies,

  2. Capitalize on what they build from project to project,

  3. Have a better visibility by keeping their whole strategy/blueprint in one place,

  4. Help scale their operations and development staff on DevOps issues.

We've left our jobs to focus on this because the more we talk about it with other professionals, the more we see our approach addresses a very real problem. Some clients have even pre-purchased the product.

We've run large project with the alpha of devo.ps for more than 6 months. We know our approach is technically sound and we're confident that the demand is here.

What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?

There are currently two options to solve your DevOps issues:

  • The black box: Heroku, DotCloud, AppFog and the likes. You settle for somebody else's DevOps approach and decide to forget about the problem.

  • The DIY approach: using various tools (Chef/Puppet, Capistrano, Jenkins...) and investing heavy resources into implementing parts of the DevOps tool chain (automation, orchestration, deployment...).

These do not answer the fundamental challenges:

  • The Heroku-likes are mainly solving the deployment and (horizontal) scaling problems, while obfuscating the infrastructure layer, effectively locking you out of your own infrastructure. There are many (hard) problems beyond these issues, and if you're going to invest in solving them, you'd better own the solutions.

  • Building things on your own is not only expensive, but time consuming and risky. DevOps profiles are a rare breed and hard to evaluate. Moreover, this approach lacks portability and visibility.

We want to provide users who outgrew the Heroku stage but don't have a dedicated DevOps team with a platform they can invest in building their strategy, from provisioning to automation. In our experience, this is the vast majority of the market.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

Heroku and the likes may (wrongly) appear as competitors. They have their place in the ecosystem for teams who specifically don't want or can't worry about DevOps, however their very model is preventing them from addressing the scope we cover as the "secret sauce" is the product. devo.ps gives you a bunch of lego bricks to cook your own secret sauce (and a potentially stronger at that).

We also consider releasing an Open Source version to let users contribute plugins to support new technologies at a higher pace than competition.

We feel more threatened by PuppetLabs and Opscode; we actually use Chef on a lower level, but their online/hosted strategy is very far from what we're set to build.

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?

Development and Operations are two different beasts. The Heroku stand is an attempt at obfuscating Operations from developers. Chef/Puppets are just better tools for Operations.

This is why we've witnessed teams moving on from Heroku passed a certain scale of operations, and why more Puppets/Chef doesn't mean a better collaboration between the teams (high barriers of entry and poor visibility, leaving development teams in the dark).

The bottom line:

  1. The larger portion of the market are companies who don't have (yet) a large and/or dedicated DevOps team but are passed the scale for Heroku.

  2. Companies need a better platform they can invest in freely: no lock-in, no technology limitations (or at least none they can't contribute to remove, that's why we propose an Open Source version), access to their infrastructure.

  3. Development and Operations teams need tools with a better shared visibility for them to collaborate.

How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize you can't know precisely, but give your best estimate.)

To start with, 2 main revenue streams;

  • Paying customers: we let people manage 1 server for free and then charge with an approach fairly similar to Github (more $ for more servers, even more $ for managing teams and permission levels, even more $ for dedicated "enterprise" boxes).

  • Kickback from integrated 3rd parties (hosting and services aka AWS and Cloudkick for example).

Later approaches would consider consulting and in-house solutions for larger companies with support and heavy customization of the tool to build or adapt to complex DevOps workflow.

We already have pre-purchases from a few companies. We're expecting to generate revenue before the end of the year from medium to large organizations (mostly large non-profit and development teams).

We're still trying to appreciate the actual TAM for our specific product: the estimates we've read for IaaS and PaaS diverge widely. The size range though is large enough to have the three of us leaving well paid jobs.

If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

We've been running an alpha version of our technology for more than 6 months, for the UN and medium sized organizations.

We've been rewriting it from the ground up for about 10 weeks now with a team of 1 at first, then 2 and now 3 (me excluded) who all joined devo.ps full time.

We currently have north of 12K LOC, stripped of any blank lines, comments, third party libraries or embedded documentation for a total size of 300KB. The whole thing is about 40 MB.

How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you're launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)?

Very close to a launch.

We have 4 more weeks (2 sprints) planned before releasing a beta to our early customers. So far we have agreements with 5 companies to purchase and use this beta: we're expecting revenue before the end of the year.

If you have an online demo, what's the url? (Please don't password protect it; just use an obscure url.)

Not online yet, but will be at http://devo.ps soon (two more sprints to go, which should leaves us with a release for end of November).

For now it's a simple blog and landing page around of which we're building our marketing.

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?

Our audience is obviously technical:

  • First server for free, addressed to programmers who may use it for personal projects or simply kick the tires.

  • Open Source version of the project, leaving advanced features out (cloud and 3rd party integration...). It would also help with contributed plugins for supporting new technologies.

  • Partner with consulting/development shops to bundle it in their proposal through various incentive (that's what we've seen done a lot with Github).

  • We've approached several well known startups in SF already. They've shown great interest in trying out our tool: this would give us great exposure.

  • Regular marketing, sponsoring startups with our tool, providing free use of the service to non-profit and Open Source projects, ...

If you're already incorporated, when were you? Who are the shareholders and what percent does each own? If you've had funding, how much, at what valuation(s)?

We have an LLC incorporated in Delaware (Solution Beam LLC) since last year (end of 2011), owned entirely by me (Ronan); I originally created it to provide consultancy in the US, but could use it as a vehicle to open a bank account and charge our customers.

We've considered and are open to the idea of incorporating a new company for devo.ps specifically.

If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?

All of them.

Do any founders have other commitments between January and March 2013 inclusive?

No.

Do any founders have commitments in the future (e.g. finishing college, going to grad school), and if so what?

No.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

  • Ronan: I already moved to San Francisco,

  • Vincent and Makara: are now in Shanghai and considering moving to San Francisco,

The company have its HQ in San Francisco. We are a technological company, the Bay Area is the best choice for us (we actually just moved the HQ from DC for that very reason). We may keep developers in other places, but at the very least the core of our sales and product teams will be in the Bay.

Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? Will any be working as employees or consultants for anyone else?

Vincent may be working as a devo.ps consultant through Wiredcraft (my previous company) on projects that would allow to deploy our product and improve our expertise (performance and scalability, deployment strategy, etc) and visibility (some of these contracts include the World Bank and MTV).

Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If so, how can you safely use it? (Open source is ok of course.)

We're relying on various Open Source projects (including Chef). Apart from that, nothing that I (Ronan) doesn't directly own the IP of.

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.

  • Kimchi: already prototyped and field tested at Wiredcraft. It allows to manage documents as markdown files hosted on Github and supports templates, layouts, includes... These can then be generated into "branded" PDF and HTML versions that include the usual cruft; style guidelines (color, fonts...), contact information and other "coating".

  • Treehouse/Codeacademy for China: there is an explosion of (medium to large to very large) high-tech companies and recruitment is increasingly hard (poor educational system and limited amount of students who chose or have access to CS programs, ...). These skills can easily be converted in financial incentives (higher salary that quickly increase as you learn more) AND answers a very large and pressing demand from companies with deep pocket.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

Chinese people do NOT get irony and sarcasm. Not. At. All. Everything is being taken at face value. And being French, that's the foundation of my humor (if any).

I ventured a few theories over the years; I think that because Chinese is at the same time so simple in its grammar and so rigid in its use of intonations, it does not leave much room for the traditional ways of being ironic or sarcastic.

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