Our Investment in VictorOps: Devops Will Never Be the Same

VictorOps is a great example of the convergence of long-term relationship building and betting on teams that are focused on hard problems they really care about.

I met Todd Vernon when he was running Lijit and I was at Sutter Hill. Although Sutter Hill did not end up investing, I made a mental note that Todd was a Founder/CEO that I’d love to find an opportunity to work with in the future. 5 years, a new company for him, a new firm for me, and many career data points later, I’m thrilled that the timing is finally right.

The problem VictorOps is solving is one lived and breathed by the founding team in their past lives as DevOps. Today it is common for a broad swath of the engineering organization to share responsibility for the care and feeding of an in-production application that is often the lifeblood of the company’s business. In fact, the DevOps culture is rooted in the experience of being on the front lines for critical business systems while wearing the hat of both software development and IT operations. Managing these responsibilities requires context from the relevant alerts (typically sent in 140 characters or less), deep knowledge of the underlying systems, and collaboration to handle and remediate potentially critical software system alerts. And it’s not always easy to get full context and fluid communication between groups when your hair’s on fire. Our very own Entrepreneur in Residence, Paul Melmon, tells of getting an uncomfortable call back in 2000 from the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher to ask, “Why is your site down?”

The DevOps market is woefully under-served. Existing solutions seem to think first about the systems rather than the people that are responsible for keeping these systems up and running. VictorOps changes that. For example, they know that more often than not DevOps folks get alerts when they are not in front of a computer screen, so VictorOps has focused from day one on making a rich experience for mobile. The current alert streams also lack critical context for how a company’s systems are organized and, most importantly, for prior incidents and solutions. The process for planning and managing DevOps teams is brittle, lacking both the flexibility and the strength to deal with the complexity of multiple, overlapping teams. As a result, the DevOps job is harder than it needs to be. We strongly believe that VictorOps can make a big contribution here.

Finally, It’s always wonderful to see a team that’s willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in. Todd built the initial iOS app himself, is a magnet for talent and can develop a team that can really get stuff done. I am ecstatic we’re working with Todd, Bryce, Dan and the team at VictorOps to make the world a better place for DevOps folks everywhere.