hi Jeff Rick here with the cube welcome were excited to to get out and talk to startups people that are founding companies when they come out of stealth mode we're in a great position that we get a chance to talk to him early and we're really excited to have a cute conversation with karthik rao the founder and CEO of signal effects just coming out of stealth congratulations thank you Jeff so how long you've been working behind the scenes trying to get this thing going yeah we've been at it for two years now so two years a founder and I started the company in February of 2013 so excited to finally launch and make our product available to the world all right excellent congratulations that's always a great thing we've launched a few companies on the cube so hopefully this will be another great success so talk a little bit about first off you and your journey we have a lot of entrepreneurs that watch a show and I think it's it's an interesting topic as to how do you get to the place where you basically found in launched a company yeah absolutely I started my career at a company at a cloud company before cloud really exists this is a market there's a company called loud cloud oh yeah Marc Andreessen right recent horse or two of the company and we were trying to do what the public cloud vendors are doing today before the market was really all that big and before the technologies really existed to do it well but that was my first introduction to cloud o came out of college and that's where I met my co-founder Phillip Lou as well Phil and I were both working on the monitoring products at loud cloud from there I ended up at VMware for a good run of about seven years where I ran product had always wanted to start a company and then a couple of years ago Phil and I thought the timing was right and we had a great idea and decided to go build signal effects together okay so what was kind of the genesis of the idea you know a lot of times it's a cool technology looking for a problem to solve a lot of times it's a problem that you know and if I only had one of these they would solve my problems so how did the how did that whole process work yeah it was rooted in personal experience my co-founder phil was at Facebook for several years and was responsible for building the monitoring systems at Facebook and through our personal experience and what we'd seen in the marketplace we had a fundamental belief and a vision that monitoring for modern applications is now an analytics problem modern applications are distributed they're not you know a single database running on is system you know even small companies now have hundreds of VMs running on public cloud infrastructure and so the only way to really understand what's happening across all of these distributed applications is to collect the data centrally and use analytics and so that was our fundamental insight when we started signal effects what we saw in the marketplace was that most of the monitoring technologies haven't really evolved in the past 15 or 20 years and they're still largely designed for traditional static enterprise applications where if you get an alert when an individual node is down or a static thresholds been passed that's enough but that doesn't really work for modern apps because they're so distributed right if one node out of your twenty nodes is having a problem it doesn't necessarily mean that your application is having a trough having a problem and so the only way to really draw that insight is to collect the data and do analytics on it and that's what signal okay really because that distributed nature of modern of modern apps and modern architecture yes there are three things that are fundamentally different number one modern applications are distributed in nature and so you really have to look at patterns across many systems number two they're changing for more frequently than traditional enterprise apps because they're hosted for the most part route applications so you can push changes out every day if you want to and then third they're typically operated by product organizations and not IT organizations so you have developers or DevOps organizations that are actually operating the software and those three changes are quite substantial and require a new set of products right and so the other guys are just they're still kind of in the you know fire off the pager alert something is going down it's very noisy yes when you're firing off alerts every time an individual alert goes off when you've got thousands of a DM and we all know that the trend these days is towards micro services architectures you know small componentized you know containers or VMs and so you don't have to have a very sophisticated large application to have a lot of systems it's so do you fit into other existing kind of infrastructure monitoring systems or kind of infrastructure management systems so I'm sure you know it's another tool right guys got to manage a lot of stuff how does that work yeah we are focused on the analytics part of the problem okay so we collect data from any sources so our customers are typically sending us data you know infrastructure data that they're collecting using their own agents we have agents that we can provide to collect it a lot of the developers are instrumenting their own metrics that they care about so for example they might care about latency metrics and knowing Layton sees by customer by region so they'll send us all that data and then we provide a very rich analytics solution and platform for them to monitor all of this and and in real time detect patterns and anomalies so you just said you have customers but you coming out stealth so you have some beta customers already yes we have great customers already now just beta customers right are great console customers awesome yes congratulation thank you very much they're very excited about our product and we you know they range from small startups to fairly large web companies that are sending in tens of billions of data points every day into signal effects right right and again in the interest of sharing the knowledge with all of our entrepreneurs out there you know when did they get involved in the process how much of the kind of product development definition did they did they participate in you said you've been at it for a couple years yeah we've had a lot of conviction about this space from the very beginning because we our team had solved this problem for themselves and in previous experiences but we did include we've been in beta for about six months but better to launch and so over the course of those six months we recalibrated based on feedback we got from customers but on the whole we you know are we philosophy and the approach that we took was was pretty much validated by the early customers that we engaged with okay excellent and so um I assume your venture funded we are can you can you talk about who your who your backers are yes we raised twenty eight and a half million dollars eight million dollars yeah twenty-eight point five million dollars from andreessen horowitz okay with Ben Horowitz on our board okay and Charles River ventures with a lurker on our board and how big are you now time in terms of the company well we're just getting started now right at this is 1 million all that money - well we we've got a great group of engineers or our company is you know and still in the few dozen people stage at this point ok we're planning to invest aggressively in building out our team both on R&D and on the go-to-market side this excellent once you detect patterns and anomalies what's kind of the action steps you work with with other systems to swap stuff out together because now I hear like it's these huge data centers they don't swap out this they don't swap out machines they swap out racks it's soon they'll be swapping out data centers so what are some of the prescriptive things that people are using they couldn't do before by using your yeah I'll give you a great example of that one of our early beta customers they do code pushes very aggressively you know once a week they'll push out changes into their environment and they had a signal effects console open which and we're a real-time solution so every second they're seeing updates of what was happening in their infrastructure they pushed out their code and they immediately detected a memory leak and they saw their memory usage just growing immediately after they did their code Bush and they were able to roll it back before any of their users noticed any issues and so that's an example of these days a lot of problems introduced into environments are human driven problems it's a code push it's a new user gets onboard it or a new customer gets onboard and all of a sudden there's 10x the load onto your systems and so when you have a product like signal effects where you can in real time understand everything that's happening in your environment you can quickly detect these changes and determine what the appropriate next step is and that appropriate next step will depend on your application and who you are and what you're building right so our key philosophies we get out of your way but we give you all of the insights and the tools to figure out what's happening in your arm right it's interesting that really kind of two comes from from your partners you know kind of Facebook experience right because they're pushing out new code all the time when there's no fast and break things right right exactly and then you're at VMware so you know kind of the enterprise site so what if you could speak a little bit about kind of this consumerization of IT on the enterprise side and not so much the way that the look and feel of the thing works but really taking best practices from a consumer IT companies like Facebook like Amazon that really changed the game because it used to be the big enterprise software guys had the best apps now it's it's really flipped for people like Google and Netflix and those guys have the best apps and even more importantly they drive the expectation of the behavior of an application every Enterprise is finally getting it and then are they really embracing it we're definitely seeing a growth in new application development I think you know when I spend a lot of time talking to CIOs at enterprises as well and they all understand that in order to be competitive you have to invest in applications it's not enough to just view IT as a cost center and they're all beginning to invest in application development and in some cases these are digital media teams that are separate from traditional IT and other places it's you know they're they're more closely tied together but we absolutely see a kind of growth in application development in many of these end up looking a lot like the development teams that we see here in the Bay Area you know and companies that are building staffs and consumer cloud apps yeah exciting time so you should coming out of stealth what's kind of your your next kind of milestone that you're looking forward to you have a big some announcements you got show you're gonna kind of watch out we're we're we're gonna see you make a big splash well for us it's it's steadily building our business and so we hope to you know we're launching now and we've got a lot of great customers already and hope to sign on several more and help our customers build great applications about that's our focus again congratulations two years that's a big development project Karthik thank growl the founder and CEO of signal effects just launching their company coming out of stealth we'd love to get them on the cube share the knowledge with you guys both the people that are trying to start your own company take a little inspiration as well as as the people that need the service tomorrow with the cloud with a modern application thanks a lot thank you Jeff thank you you're 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