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-Hi. My name is Justin Samuel.
I'm the founder of Less Bits.
We make server management software,
security software and hosting automation software.
I was originally a web developer and a sys admin.
One of my first jobs, a programming job
where I also was learning, cut my teeth on being assistive,
and I became responsible for the company's service security,
and started taking responsibility
for application security too.
And I just got really into security.
So I would be finding vulnerabilities
in our company's software,
finding vulnerabilities in our competitor's software,
and researching and learning things about vulnerabilities,
and I would teach myself just on the Internet
and find the vulnerabilities
in the hosting control panel software that we used.
I just...I fell in love with security.
I just love it. I was on fire.
I'd spend my free time just digging and digging,
and I hit this point, this was early 2000s,
where I just realized I wanted to be a security expert,
and I was going to have to go back to school
and get a CS degree to get the fundamentals to truly do that.
So that's what I did. I went back to school.
While there, I got involved in research as an undergrad,
and I just...Things just started snowballing from there.
I fell in love with research.
I took time off between even before grad school
to do more research, and went into a PhD program.
It was an amazing experience and amazing people.
I learned so much, and some of the work I did there,
I'm super, super proud of the impact that it had.
For example, some of the work
we did was finding vulnerabilities
is basically every major Linux distributions package managers.
These vulnerabilities, they ranged from...
The effect of, like, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian,
even outside of the categories of these vulnerabilities,
we found them even outside of Linux, like in BSDs.
And to exploit these,
what it took was a man-in-the-middle attack,
and we found that this was a situation where you didn't need
to take control of, like, network traffic,
like intercept packets and this kind of thing.
You actually could just volunteer to be a man
in the middle essentially, because of the low barrier
towards offering to become a community mirror
for these different package manager repositories.
It was amazing.
We went and notified all of the distros
so they could work on fixes
before we announced these vulnerabilities.
In the process of our research, we collected lots of data
from severs that were vulnerable hitting the mirror that we ran.
We saw like military computers,
government computers, all these things,
and knowing that all these systems were vulnerable,
and the work that I had done had impact on like,
securing all of this.
It was just absolutely amazing.
And we published our research and moved on,
and moved on to other research.
So yeah, that was amazing.
And that kind of practical immediate impact research
is generally not the focus of academic research.
For me, it's that like practical,
immediate impact that really drives me.
I wanted to build software and make impact,
and people can use it now.
And seeing the huge opportunities
that were happening with,
you know, all the cloud progress that was happening,
it just drove me from academia back into the industry.
So that's enough from me, I want to talk today
about how modern clouds
and software have just totally swung open the doors
for entrepreneurs to take on old, established industries.
So you may have seen this quote before or some variation of it.
The original quote doesn't say success,
it says... instead it says luck.
So, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Well, since you're here watching this,
and you're participating in DigitalOcean deploy,
you know the world is changing,
and you know that with all these cloud technology changes
and so much changing so quickly
that there's endless possibilities,
and there's endless opportunities.
So the opportunity is there, and you know it and I know it.
It's... That's a fact right now.
And add to that fact that you've been...
Also been on the forefront,
learning, you know, you're watching this,
you're participating in these things,
you know what's happening in the market and the industry.
Keeping your eyes open, you're prepared!
So this is a unique time, you look at this statement,
you know, and think about where that fits for you.
Everywhere you look, costs are going down.
Those are not only costs in dollars,
but also cost in time and energy.
So like, cost of infrastructure management
and just infrastructure itself, cost of development,
cost of learning, cost of reaching customers
and cost of every service that you use,
and there's new services being launched every day
that help you save more time and more money,
and do more with a smaller team.
Your ability, as a small or mid-size company
to compete with giant and established competitors
just keeps increasing every day.
And that means competition,
both in reinventing those existing industries
as well as defining completely new ones.
And it's long been said, you know you've heard
before that new companies have an innovation advantage
over established companies.
And it's true, and it gets more true every day.
And you can just hear big companies explicitly
talking about how they're trying to act like start-ups,
because they want to innovate,
and they see that start-ups are eating their lunch.
But if any of you have seen the inside of a big company,
you know that between the existing culture
they've created,
and how hard it is to change the direction of any big ship,
they just don't stand a chance against the right entrepreneur
who understands how to build for this modern world.
And so what are those things that you know that they don't?
Well, among some of them are the critical importance
of simplicity and support for your customers,
combined with providing them platforms
to build their businesses on top of.
So technology is inherently complicated,
companies like Less Bits and DigitalOcean
are simplifying.
We're taking things that were once difficult,
and required huge time investments,
and turning them into beautiful,
easy, empowering tools and experiences.
And add into that a clear focus on building trust
and making your customer successful
through amazing support.
And then on top of all that,
instead of just selling your customer a product,
actually knowing how to provide them a platform
for them to innovate on top of,
and build their business on top of.
And that's what we did with ServerPilot.
ServerPilot was our first product.
We launched around the same time DigitalOcean did,
I think DigitalOcean was 2012, we came out of beta in 2013.
ServerPilot was borne from a problem
I had been dealing with first hand since the early 200's,
which was managing a Linux server
for hosting high-end client websites
was just way more complicated than it needed to be.
There was existing hosting control panel
software on the market,
but it was software that was built in the late '90's,
and it was built for the shared-hosting industry.
And that industry,
the shared-hosting industry, it was...
The software they needed was to solve a different problem.
They were trying to pack a lot of low-end, low value customers
on expensive, dedicated hardware.
So that's just a totally different market,
and totally different use-case.
I've been an early adopter of VPSes,
cloud servers since the early 2000's,
and throughout the 2000's I watched
and continued to do server administration,
I was doing ad work for agencies that had high-end clients,
famous brands that needed marketing sites
for large financial companies.
And they hosted their clients on cloud servers,
but they used the same control panel software
that was made for the shared hosting industry.
Why?
That's all there was.
Years for me of being responsible for that stuff,
dealing with the breakage on upgrades, security problems,
compromises due to zero to exploits,
terrible UX, just tons of like features that were obsolete
or never needed in the first place packed in there
because that was old software philosophy,
just keep packing stuff in there,
and that's what value is.
But I knew that I wasn't the only one
who needed something better than that,
and it was clear that a greater migration was going to happen.
It wasn't just my frustration,
cloud servers were getting cheaper,
and there was only one direction it was going to go in.
The industry, while it was changing,
and some of the web hosts out there, they didn't care,
or they were fine just extracting profit
from what they already had.
Which is fine, there's nothing wrong or immoral about that.
Others though, they did want to adapt,
but they didn't have the culture.
They didn't have the vision to do that.
And it's one of those things,
that if a company isn't built with that vision
and that culture as part of its DNA,
it just can't develop that overnight.
So when DigitalOcean launched,
they caused an earthquake in the hosting industry.
Suddenly, not only could you get a $5 cloud server
rather than a $20 cloud server,
but it was also just crazy easy to use.
DigitalOcean, they boiled it down.
They made cloud servers unintimidating,
like why should you need to chose your partitions?
Why shouldn't your default option just be sane,
opinionated ones?
Why shouldn't you have a server in just a minute
with a couple of clicks?
Why should you have to like feel like an expert
to have a cloud server?
And since then, every hosting company
has had their eyes glued to DigitalOcean.
They're afraid.
Every major hosting company's executives are afraid.
They talk about it. They've talked about it with me.
They're sitting on a cash cow,
but as this mass migration happens
and the world changes, they might get left behind.
And you know, for the ones that don't adapt,
they probably should be left behind.
It just shouldn't be hard, in this day and age,
to start and amazing hosting company in a world
where there's things like DigitalOcean and ServerPilot.
And well, that's why we built HostLaunch.
HostLaunch is built on what I think personally should be
a really obvious concept, which is, why should it be hard
to launch an absolutely amazing modern managed hosting company
built on top of DigitalOcean's ServerPilot and Stripe?
So DigitalOcean has solved cloud servers.
ServerPilot has solved server management.
Stripe solved payments.
We don't live in this world
that gave birth to traditional hosting companies
that had to go different a coload
to stuff their hardware in, write their own software
or take off-the-shelf ancient hosting company software,
fax forms to open a merchant account to credit cards.
That's not the world we live in.
That's what hosting companies... That's what they had to do.
In all of their software and culture and infrastructure,
and everything down to their bones is built like that.
Instead, we made it so you can have your own hosting company
in minutes on modern platforms.
You just drop in your API keys for DigitalOcean, ServerPilot,
Stripe, set your prices, and you have your own awesome,
amazing modern hosting company.
So part of what's going on with this new world
of cloud infrastructure and services
is that totally new architectures
and business models are possible now.
You can focus your innovation at a higher level.
So for example, ServerPilot was the world's first software
as a service control panel.
At the time we launched, it seemed crazy to some people,
because they thought that control panels
are supposed to run on each server,
and they're supposed to expose a plain http insecure web
interface out there for the world, right?
That's just how it's always been done
and that's how it's supposed to be.
Same with DigitalOcean.
When they launched, it seemed crazy to some people.
Like how can you build a business
when you have customers that want to pay $5 for a server?
This was a world where the cloud was...
People thought it was for enterprise.
And $5 seemed like a stupid idea to people,
well certainly not stupid or crazy now!
So what other innovations are possible in a world
where the number of cloud Servers is just exploding,
and being used for every purpose imaginable,
and being used by every user imaginable.
So here's another example from our latest product launch.
An agent-based ModSecurity running on your server
that allows you do to industry-standard web
application firewall technology through a WordPress plug in,
and manage centrally as a task service.
So that's a lot. But think about it.
So for more than a decade,
eager WordPress plug in developers
have been trying to roll their own WAF in PHP code.
Why didn't they just use the same industry standard
WAF engine, ModSecurity that the rest of the industry uses.
You know, the same thing that like cloud uses
and lots of enterprises use, why, because
WordPress plug ins are written in PHP
and ModSecurity isn't written in PHP.
But why not run ModSecurity at a local agent,
WordPress plug in can talk to?
Well, 10 years ago, there wasn't a market for it
because everyone was on shared hosting,
and you couldn't just install your own server software.
But as WordPress sites undergo this massive migration
of cloud providers, like DigitalOcean,
people have control over what runs on their servers.
And this is such a... It's a huge migration,
like a huge percentage of DigitalOcean's clients
and customers and servers are WordPress
and WordPress developers.
So this is a whole new ball game for WordPress,
and this is just one example.
There's so much room for innovation
now with this massive shift of hosting to cloud servers,
and that innovation doesn't just have to be new developer tools.
Today's fast, easy reliable cloud servers
have allowed developers all kinds of ability
to identify new markets
where they can create innovative solutions.
Like one of my favorites, as an example,
is this company Resurva.
Resurva, they're a SaaS booking service
that's used by barbershops all throughout the world,
and other clients too who need to manage
and schedule appointments.
So the company who makes Resurva,
they started off as a digital agency
building beautiful websites
and awesome web applications for their clients.
And the whole time, they were dreaming of something bigger.
They wanted to put their passion and energy and love
into building their own product,
not just being contracted to build products for others.
And they were an early adopter of ServerPilot.
Their team, they're extremely efficient and productive,
I'm just constantly impressed
by what they can do with their team.
And they leverage their success as an agency to create Resurva.
Now Resurva is the core business.
And part of the way it got that was it
just by being so efficient,
by choosing amazingly smart tools to build on top of,
and keeping IN technology.
And they're constantly looking for ways to innovate,
figuring out with us and other companies
how to leverage new solutions to add value for their client.
They could have been sitting around for the past 10 years
doing the same things over, and over and over again,
and getting the same results.
That's not in their blood,
and we're going to keep innovating too.
We've got more ideas than we can build, and we'll get there.
But most importantly, we need great people,
and our customers need great people do.
We firmly believe...
And we build our business around the idea that we're successful
when our customers are successful.
And so that's why, for example, the HostLaunch pricing
is that you only pay when you have paying customers.
It doesn't cost you anything to start your hosting company.
This makes it very clear for us internally
that we're focused on our customers
growing their businesses on top of our platforms.
And that's also why we're helping our customers,
such as Resurva, hire.
We can help our customers grow
by connecting them with talented people,
and those talented people are often customers for us.
So if you're looking for career options,
or you use our software and are looking to hire,
please take a look at lessbits.com/careers.
We love helping people, we're building a company
for people who love to learn
and want grow professionally and personally.
We've attracted amazing people to our team,
I know everyone says their team is amazing,
but honestly, it's just crazy exciting
to be a part of this team right now.
And a huge part of our goal is not only to build
an awesome set of products that our customers love,
but also to build an amazing company
that we just want to stay a part of.
We want people who can grow with us, with our company,
and people who want to be with us on this journey
for the long run.
So there's a lot of jobs out there,
nothing in this company is just a job.
If you're interested, please get in touch!
Thanks for you time, I'm looking forward to your questions.