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5 QUESTIONS with VictorOps co-founder Todd Vernon
[December 30, 2012]

5 QUESTIONS with VictorOps co-founder Todd Vernon


Dec 30, 2012 (Daily Camera - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Todd Vernon, a local entrepreneur who was involved in starting companies such as Raindance Communications and Lijit Inc., spoke briefly with the Camera last week about his latest startup called VictorOps.



VictorOps plans to build a technology that lets operations teams collaborate during software system failures and outages.

The following has been edited for clarity and space.


1. What factors led to the launch of VictorOps First of all, all of my companies have been transactional ... mine tend to be really high volume, so it's really painful when it goes away.

After having companies that will build the solution and then deploy it and operate it, there's been very little done to help operations teams after those platforms are built.

... Having had these companies, I know it takes whole teams of people keeping those operational. They spend time remediating problems and those problems happen day or night.

Just by virtue, anything that happens in the middle of the night -- which is 50 percent of the time -- takes all night to fix, because you don't have the right people. ... It gets solved by morning, but all those people (involved) are in bed.

That's kind of a problem.

What companies do is they graft together all these different tools to help these teams. They'll use anything from Yahoo Chat to enterprise chat. They'll use their own personal phones with SMS to get the first alert, their own address book.

They kind of pass around who's responsible and nobody really know who the first responder is. There's a lot of confusion.

There are all these kinds of problems that are very similar to problems that are solved for sales teams with Salesforce.com and for development teams by Rally (Software), but it's never been solved for operations.

The reason they've never had one, it's because their problem domain is a 24-by-7 situation. Because you, by default, didn't have access to your whole team, there's just no point in building a collaborative platform because they all aren't near their computers.

There's been a shift and that's (the incorporation of) mobile devices. Now a collaborative session that includes data and voice and chat can be brought into a mobile device and a computer. Now what you can get is passive involvement.

They can actually scalably involve themselves while they're doing other parts of their lives ... without getting sucked into the machine.

What we aim to do is bring as many eyes and brains to bear on the problem in a scalable fashion.

2. What products and services will VictorOps' offer It's a completely unified service. There are different ways to interact with it. You can interact with it via the web, via a computer. Our revenue stream will be similar to Rally and by the seat.

There's a wealth of information that would come off a platform like this that could be sold in a number of ways. ... Now you have a complete audit trail of how the problem was solved. You'll have the ability to use the audit trail to use in future problems.

3. What did you take away from Raindance and Lijit that you plan to incorporate here I guess I have a couple random thoughts. One is the teams that are enabling the solution are amazingly important to the organization, but often are completely overlooked. They tend to be pretty proud people. We tend to have a pretty serious, almost military vibe to (VictorOps website) because that's how these people are. They're proud, but they'll never be the ones to raise their hands and say, "Oh, by the way, I saved the company last night." They're massively important and overlooked individuals and we want to celebrate them. That's definitely a big takeaway.

A more mechanical takeaway is having been responsible for technology as CEO or CTO (with Raindance), there is an absolutely amazing amount of money spent in this industry to sell companies devices, hardware and software that promise that you won't have any problems. The fact of the matter is none of these companies are hiring less operations folks, they're hiring more.

The most valuable technical asset is the people and their knowledge and nobody is selling a solution that helps them.

4. What are some critical factors that need to come together in the short term for VictorOps to have success Right out of the gate, we stacked the deck. We have an awesome team that knows the space so amazingly well. I'd say there's very little concept risk in it, if you will.

There's very little financing risk in that I've got some of the best VCs in town as I've had in the past that act very predictably and very logically. That's awesome. I have a great software team that I need to augment with a few extra people.

5. What are the time tables for certain alpha, beta and other launches We're hoping to identify alpha customers ... and probably reaching out to those guys in three to four months. We're planning on doing an alpha in six months and a beta in nine months.

Our goal is to generate revenue by the end of 2013 and I think it's totally achievable by then because of the head start we have on understanding the product.

-- Alicia Wallace ___ (c)2012 the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.) Visit the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.) at www.dailycamera.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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