Skip to content

YC Application W14

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Ronan Berder edited this page Oct 22, 2013 · 15 revisions

Company name:

devo.ps

Company url, if any:

http://devo.ps

Phone number(s):

(+1) 415 528 9885, (+86) 136 7194 3352

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

http://youtu.be/IVXZSqIcoi4

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

balou hunvreus

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.)

balou hunvreus

What is your company going to make?

The GitHub of infrastructure.

devo.ps lets you easily manage your entire infrastructure, from setting up servers to deploying your apps, the same way you write code. Some key features:

  • Git. Create a simple JSON file describing your server. git commit, git push and you're done; we manage the complexity of providers (AWS, Linode, ...) and setting up software on your boxes.

  • Best-practices & Security. By default, devo.ps is setting things up the right way. We make sure your services are starting on boot, that permissions are properly handled, that passwords are strong...

  • Development. Instead of fighting to replicate your infrastructure on your local machine, download a VM and run, right of-the-box, your entire production setup.

If this application is a response to a YC RFS, which one?

N/A

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.

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

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

I salvaged old engine parts Solex and went on to build a fully working engine. Eventually, I used the rebuilt Solex for a charity race. The end goal wasn't much the race itself but the entire journey from gathering pieces and learning the inside and out of a technology I had no idea about and tuning it to make the best out of what was available.

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.

BRTData.org (http://brtdata.org/) provides a dashboard for transportation indicators from various agencies around the world (Embarq, SIBRT, IEA).

We used Dropbox as the main storage backend, removing the need for a regular CMS. Data partners get invited to the Dropbox folder and start to drop in Excel spreadsheets.

This actually led us to build a distributed CMS based on Dropbox/Box; getboxcms.com (to be released soon).

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

We met 8 years ago while working at a publishing company. We were in charge of Operations and Development. We've been friends ever since and have been working together for the past 3 years at Wiredcraft, Ronan's consultancy, doing work for the UN, the World Bank, CNN, governments...

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 together on both infrastructure and software development; from simple projects for small NGOs to large scale platforms for CNN, PayPal, the UN, governments...

There are some great tools available to manage your infrastructure and get your code running. But the overall experience is still frustrating, even for people as skilled as ourselves. You can either use a PaaS, which basically means giving away control of and visibility into your infrastructure to a third party (and an expensive one at that), or you are lucky enough to have the resources to invest into building your Ops strategy, putting in place automation, configuration management, monitoring.... And maintaining it all.

Eventually, you'll need a domain expert to manage your infrastructure and this is where the bottleneck is. The solutions out there are either not trying to lower the barriers of entry (Opscode, Puppet and the like are living off of training/consultancy) or are simply black-boxes (PaaS).

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)?

Right now people use one of the following options:

  • PaaS (Heroku, Appfog, NodeJitsu): their approach is equivalent to outsourcing your entire ops to a third party. PaaS is "app-centric".

  • Tools (Puppet Labs, Opscode, Ansible, SaltStack): most of their revenue is coming from Enterprise support, consultancy, and training. These tools are "ops-centric".

  • DIY: generally unsustainable or very small scale in nature.

We're building devo.ps to be transparent, using the technical stack teams are familiar with while lowering the barriers of entry to building and maintaining it.

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

Initially, we'll have to compete against tools (Ansible, Chef et al) since our product is, for now, approaching the problem from the Ops point of view. However, we are adding more abstraction that will help use devo.ps in an "app-centric" way (more user-friendly), which means we'll be competing with PaaS. Heroku is the biggest challenger in that category.

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

On one end, companies like Opscode and PuppetLabs are missing the point; what's hard in operations is not the lack of tools like Chef and Puppet, but the lack of qualified staff to operate them.

On the other end, solutions like Heroku effectively lock Ops out of their infrastructure and create a completely new field of knowledge that people need to learn in order to build things (with admittedly a more developer-friendly workflow).

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

Subscription-based:

  • Free tier for up to 3 servers, then paying tiers depending on the number of servers/nodes.

  • Enterprise version that runs on premises.

We think the opportunity here is massive. "Software is eating the world" and we intend to provide the ubiquitous solution to maintain the infrastructure it runs on. Billions of dollars.

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?

1 year, 12K LOC.

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)?

We're finalizing the third version of our software. Prior to this we developed a proof of concept and then a first version which we put in production for several clients. We have pre-sales for our Enterprise version from multiple clients, all in the Fortune 500.

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

The current site is out of date and we're waiting for November 15th to release the public version with the new site.

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?

To start with:

  • Free tier for up to 3 servers (startup), and free for Open Source organizations on GitHub.

  • "Manually" on-boarding well known teams of developers.

  • Regular online marketing, targeting the places our early adopters are; Hacker News for example.

We've secured pre-sales of our Enterprise version. We've also secured a few high profile teams of well known developers to onboard. They are eager to publicize our product. We're already marketing and selling our product.

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, who from, and at what valuation or valuation cap?

Not incorporated yet.

If you're not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you plan to give each founder, and anyone else you plan to give stock to. (This question is as much for you as us.)

  • Vincent Viallet (balou) - 30%

  • Ronan Berder (hunvreus) - 70%

If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it.

N/A

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?

Both of us.

For founders who can't, why not? What level of commitment are they willing to make?

N/A

Do any founders have other commitments between January through March 2014 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?

  • balou is based in Shanghai,

  • hunvreus is based in SF (with the occasional trip to Shanghai),

  • The company will be based in SF.

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?

No.

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 use Open Source, all licenses of which are fine with the SaaS model (no Affero for example).

  • We had a couple other engineers help us out with some of the code. They signed agreements securing the IP and confidentiality.

Are any of the following true? (a) You are the only founder. (b) You are a student who may return to school when the next term starts. (c) Half or more of your group can't move to the Bay Area. (d) One or more founders will keep their current jobs. (e) None of the founders are programmers. (Answering yes doesn't disqualify you. It's just to remind us to check.)

N/A

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.

  • Octochat (http://octochat.com), group chat for developers tightly integrated with GitHub.

  • getboxcms.com, a distributed CMS piggy-backing on Dropbox and Box for storage. It allows you to edit media and content locally and publish it on several platforms (Wordpress, Drupal, tumblr, Jekyll...).

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

Lots of Ops guys have a limited understanding of the technologies on the market. They like to keep using what they are comfortable with and allow themselves little room for growth. Even more surprising is that few Ops people use GitHub and make minimal contributions to open source projects.

Add a custom footer

Clone this wiki locally