Grant Miller and Christine Yen discuss how frustration at Parse and Facebook led them to start Honeycomb. They built tools to solve the system monitoring problems they faced, turning their own pain into a product.
So one of the main, the top reason why startups fail is because of lack of product market fit. And that's the most difficult thing to figure out. You think you've identified an unmet need in the marketplace, and it turns out wasn't really a problem in the marketplace or there was other competitors in the space, or you saw the need differently. So last time I checked, I think you guys raised over $15 million. You're generating revenue. But tell me a little bit about where this idea came from and how you sort of took it from this initial seed of an idea and got it to a company that's now generating revenue and has done really well in raising some capital.
Awesome. Honeycomb started because it started from myself and my co founder, Charity, working together at a company called Parse, which got bought by Facebook. And at Parse, we were dealing with tons of unmitigated chaos. We were a platform that allowed mobile developers to basically include a black box and suddenly get all the benefits of having servers and databases and everything. It meant that it was great for our users. They loved us. We had to deal with their chaos and we had to deal with, oh, gosh, the shared resources being slammed. Who is it being slammed by? Why? Who else is it impacting? How can we put a band aid on it so everyone else's service is undamaged? And this question of what's happening, why? Let's tease it apart and isolate the problems that I talked about in that demo. That's exactly what Charity and I and the other folks on the Parse team were doing day to day. We got bought by Facebook. One of the things that happens when big companies buy little companies is they kind of pat you on the head and they're like, oh, you're so cute. Here are the big kid toys. And with Facebook, most of them were garbage for our use case. Great for Facebook's use cases, not for ours. But one of them stood out. It was called Scuba. And it let us really quickly slice dice, understand our system in a way that changed how we built, how we maintained our software, how we built our software moving forward. And I think for us, really, the impetus behind this was thinking about going back out there, away from Facebook, largest software industry, and not having this tool at our fingertips because we'd spent. We had our battle scars from trying to solve these sorts of problems with traditional monitoring tools, traditional logging tools, and it was just so painful. We were like, this must exist. I think the thing that becomes easy to discount when a startup idea comes out of that environment is how much easier it is to push adoption inside an organization versus outside. Facebook has the luxury of saying, ah, well, new engineer, here are the tools you're going to use. This is why these are the trade offs and these are the only tools you get to choose from. A little different out here in the real world, but it's been a lot of fun kind of being. It's been a lot of fun being able to start off with that conviction of we know that this is the right problem to solve, that this is the right approach because we've lived it and we ourselves are true believers.
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