As an organization’s technology stacks grow in sophistication it often leads to a disparate situation when considering security, observability, and compliance as there’s no standardization in protocols. Building a cohesive strategy for technology requires the proper framework, tools, and architecture strategy that allows engineering teams to focus on development without having to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about cloud infrastructure. Massdriver is an internal development platform that allows engineering teams to quickly provision cloud infrastructure that’s consistent with an organization’s security and compliance needs. The platform features a first-of-its-kind diagramming tool that unifies the management of IT infrastructure that provides insight on observability, change management, and security in one place. Architecture can seamlessly be replicated across zones without creating the often-found bottleneck between engineering and DevOps without sacrificing performance or reliability. Massdriver supports a wide range of databases, architectures, frameworks, and platforms including Kubernetes, Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and Databricks, as well as Serverless.
LA TechWatch caught up with Massdriver CEO and Cofounder Cory O’Daniel to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$4M Seed from 1984 VC, Uncorrelated, Hack VC, Page One, Soma Capital, and Y Combinator.
Tell us about your product or service.
Massdriver enables engineers and IT staff to provision secure infrastructure & applications faster with guardrails. Less worrying about infrastructure, more confident delivery application delivery.
Private infrastructure bundles enable enterprise teams to codify their practices and compliance rules, while allowing engineers to quickly self-serve. This limits downtime risk and breaches in security and compliance. At Massdriver we want to let engineers engineer so they can focus on delivering business value, not toiling over configuring commodity infrastructure – and that’s what the C-suite wants too.
Massdriver is a visual tool. Its self-documenting. Anyone in the org can open the tool and get insights into infrastructure, data services, and applications at a glance. No more wondering if your 6-month-old LucidChart is up to date.
What inspired the start of Massdriver?
Chris Hill & I have worked together for over 7 years across a few companies. Dave and I have known each other for four years and worked together briefly.
Dave and I were working on a side project and we got into an argument about who was going to do the ops work. Two seasoned ops engineers with 15+ experience each in cloud operations argued over who was going to have to do the grunt work. We both just wanted to write value-producing software for the business. This is where the idea of Massdriver was born.
I have years of experience in application architecture and database. Dave is a serverless guru. Chris was our missing link. He has deep experience in networking, Kubernetes, and VM management. We pitched him the idea in early 2021 and he said “you mean I’d never have to write Terraform again” we said “yes” and the rest is history.
We were founded in June 2021 and joined YC in W22.
How is it different?
Massdriver is designed around the idea that the silo of knowledge between operations and engineers is a feature, not a bug. It allows teams to have expertise and focus, rather than burdening your engineering team with knowing everything about ops so they can do their job.
Massdriver is designed around the idea that the silo of knowledge between operations and engineers is a feature not a bug. It allows teams to have expertise and focus, rather than burdening your engineering team with knowing everything about ops so they can do their job. The problem with our competitors is they are designed for teams with Kubernetes experience. Most engineers don’t have this experience, and frankly, don’t want it. Massdriver also supports databases and platforms like Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and Databricks, as well as Serverless. We want to meet companies where they are and let them pick the best tool for the job. We want to support Kubernetes, but not force Kubernetes on our customers. Our competitors have pages and pages of webforms or blobs of YAML. We give engineers a diagramming interface. It’s their source of truth. It’s their documentation when onboarding new teammates. It’s how they managed and monitor their infrastructure.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We are targeting companies that are struggling to stay ahead of cloud operation timelines, whether they have an operations team or not. If you don’t have an ops team, Massdriver gives you great security defaults to get moving in the cloud quickly. If you have an ops team, Massdriver acts as the self-service layer for your software engineers, allowing your operations team to focus on real business value, instead of just handling menial tasks for engineers.
What’s your business model?
We have a usage-based subscription model starting at $99/mo for individual developers and $499/mo for teams.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown??
Staffing up! We save teams money while helping them delivery software faster. While it’s an unfortunate time for many, this is when our product thrives.
What was the funding process like?
Brutal. In my opinion, VCs are more interested in saying they are visionary than actually being visionary. They like a sure thing, at the end of the day their LPs are their Bosses. If you go out and bet big on something crazy, you’ll look the fool when it doesn’t come through.
These VCs have exacerbated the problem in cloud computing. Just look at how many logging companies there are. Why? Because its a sure thing. None of them add a level of functionality beyond the previous, but it’s lucrative, necessary, and narrowly focused. A VC’s dream.
We had so many people look us over with the “this is stupid” glare, but engineers get it, and that’s what matters at the end of the day. We refused to take a narrow view of making DevOps easier, we are taking the holistic approach, it’s hard, but if I wanted an easy job I’d go back to the cushy job that is ops.
It felt like everyone in SV looked over us and passed, it was focusing on the most ‘founder friendly’ VCs in Y Combinators database that brought us to 1984 VC, Hack VC, Uncorrelated, Some, and Page One. Teams of investors that are interested in dev tools that were operators themselves. Once we found the VCs that had experience in the space, closing was easy.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
VCs wanted us to focus on one small piece of the puzzle, and the fragmented landscape is what we were trying to solve. We want to solve something big and difficult that will improve not only the lives of engineers, but the security of our software. A lot of people are out there guessing their way through managing the cloud and no product manager is asking “is it secure?” They just want the button to click to sell the thing.
VCs wanted us to focus on one small piece of the puzzle, and the fragmented landscape is what we were trying to solve. We want to solve something big and difficult that will improve not only the lives of engineers, but the security of our software. A lot of people are out there guessing their way through managing the cloud and no product manager is asking “is it secure?” They just want the button to click to sell the thing.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
“When I started my career as a programmer, DevOps was a set of practices as opposed to a job description. But over the past few years, DevOps has burgeoned into its own org. Massdriver is the first company we met promising a total automation of the DevOps tasks and enabling engineers to self-serve infrastructure and applications in seconds.” — Ramy Adeeb, 1984 VC
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We recently launched beta support for applications, we plan to continue to focus on making it easier and easier to deploy containerized, Serverless, and VM applications.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’ve recently finished staffing up to a team of 12 and have launched most of our cornerstone features. We’ll be adding a lot of polish and trying to make it easier to run workloads of any kind on the compute a team needs without requiring operations expertise.
What is your favorite restaurant in LA?
Sausal in El Segundo. I’ve literally eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner there in one day.
