IT systems is messy and no fun • In many companies several monitoring silos exist in operations • End User Monitoring • Infrastructure Monitoring • Cloud Monitoring • Application Monitoring • …
its great if a problem is recognized already • Companies have already allocated budgets to solve this problem • Solving this problem is essential for companies that need IT to do business
solutions • We needed to understand most of them to know their strengths and weaknesses • Lots of one-trick-pony type of solutions show complexity of the problem, but also need for end-to-end visibility • Technology advances, and solutions quickly become legacy • Many solutions do have quality issues on stability or usability • Lack of automation and assistance • High dissatisfaction about the inability to solve real problems
• We also utilize modern technology to process data better • We deliver end to end visibility • We provide high quality and future proof technology • We automate root cause analysis • We solve actually day to day use cases of our customers
sales, marketing and channel at similar startup before • Pavlo renown big data and stream processing expert • Mirko serial entrepreneur, networker • Fabian domain expert and experienced engineer • Avoiding the typical anti-pattern of “I have a great idea, now I need a team to do it”
• What could be our market share • Who is our customer? • Mega tech corps like Google? • Local mom & pop shops? • Who is relevant competition? • How do we want to position ourselves? • A new product (AI Ops) • A better product (next gen APM)
Highly individual & complex architectures Head - Enterprise Customers „New architectures“ - System of innovation Head - Enterprise Customers „SOA architectures“ - System of Records Long Tail - Small Enterprises Packages Apps, Standardized less than 1.000* about 50.000* more than 1.000.000*
100 200 300 Revenue 2014 Dynatrace CA Techno- logies IBM Dell Microsoft Riverbed Splunk HP New Relic Oracle App Dynamics BMC Software Fujitsu Hitachi Nec Data Source: Gartner, Inc., „Market Share Analysis: Application Performance Monitoring, 2014“ by Federico De Silva, May 27, 2015 16% Y-2-Y growth
Client/Server Linux Open Source Web 3-Tier Java EE SOA Web 2.0 OSS Middleware Cloud Big Data µService Containers Lambda Arch. Tivoli BMC CA Nagios CA/Wily Dell/Quest Precise HP/Mercury dynatrace AppDynamics New Relic APM 1.0 APM 2.0 APM 3.0
auto update, easy install, high resolution • Container Ready • Stream processing • Algorithms and learning for data stream • Graph for understanding • “NoSQL” Storage • 3D UI and innovative visualisations
customers and partners • From previous life, network and cold calling • Practiced your pitching and marketing • Got feedback on ideas and prototypes • Narrowed down our target audience • Not trying to serve everybody • Narrowed down our solution • Ideally we would have done only 1 thing, but APM is a wide topic
it is cool, but also has a meaning. And it was “free”, except on twitter :-( • Lots of legal stuff • We incorporated in the US, due to better VC market • For investments it is important to build a good CAP table for founders, VCs and employees • Filed for Patents, Trademarks • Secured initial financing, with a convertible note
• Building a foundation, that is • good enough • operable • expandable • Hiring slowly for missing tech skills • Most of our first hires came from our network
our product from day one • Find something people are willing to pay for • This is not about profit, or break even. It is about proof. • We build “infrastructure” only monitoring. Sold to “friendly” customers, but also cold called / cheap marketing • Deliver value (even when low initially), convince of future value and execute and deliver. Keep your promises. • Underpromise and overdeliver.
of great networking potential in the bay • Everybody is open for discussions • Do not pitch your idea, but rather show results and ask for feedback based on their expertise and experience • Still tough to get into VC Money. Little trust that a team outside the valley can have success...
that our vision is way too big. The domain requires this and we knew it would be a long run • We build small features providing an outline of what the later product will look like • Many small little MVPs that form a big picture • Make components scale and redundant (and document trade-offs)
team very slowly • Focused on experts working “alone” • Since experts could be anywhere, we went global • Started to hire Sales, Pre Sales, Marketing • Always keeping cost in mind
interesting happened. • We were growing the product and customer base and making more noise marketing wise • We were starting to think about the B financing • Then suddenly VCs approached us… • … and flew in people… • …who refused to leave until we sign
to grow the company faster • Grow all departments • Cost control and planning becomes a challenge • Turn external services into internal functions Accounting, HR • Overcoming organisational challenges
watching my JavaZone vimeo, this is the thing I could not announce on stage :) vimeo.com/289698520 • Meritech is a late stage growth fund • Happy to have Alex on board now
company • However, in engineering we prefer to have teams co-located • We have 4 main engineering offices • Solingen, Germany • München, Germany • Novi Sad, Serbia • Austin, Texas, USA
an issue • Remote hiring tends to favour extroverts, meritocrats • We cannot take care of Juniors remotely • We build (currently) 4 local teams, where diversity is easier to achieve, and add a few remote people to the mix
deals with questions and comments • Engineering needs to understand and fix issues • We have currently 2 Support Engineer of the Week (SoW) • Responsibilities • Triage • Communicate (via Zendesk) • Help (Document or Implement)
major changes • Hotfixes contain bug fixes, improvements, small additions • We need to communicate around releases • Marketing • Customer Success • Sales • SaaS is “hot-fixed” almost daily • On Premises Releases trail SaaS releases
for longer design and requirements work • We use Notion.so as internal documentation & knowledge base and for shorter lived working documents. • For drafting things, we also use Google Docs / Sheets
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