platform that was a real-time ad exchange that performed more than 1 billion real-time transactions per day. Lijit was generating more than $35 million per year when Federated Media acquired it.
Vernon said the lessons learned at those companies have served him well in building VictorOps.
“Having done it a couple times, you have access to great people that you’ve worked with before, you have access to capital you can execute on, and the real difference this time is we’re building a product in a domain we uniquely understand,” Vernon said.
VictorOps is growing and expects to have a staff of up to 30 before too long. It also hit development goals ahead of schedule, and it expects to have a product ready for general availability in January. VictorOps has spent about $1 million of the seed round and now has a warchest of around $7 million. It is pre-revenue.
“We essentially got to where we thought we’d be in a year in nine months, and the investment community saw it the same way, and that it’s now an execution play, hence the pretty large capital raise. It just made everyone want to go fast.”
The capital will be spent building out the leadership, sales, marketing, and customer service teams. There also will be a big investment in VictorOps’ own infrastructure to make sure its product performs as the company scales up.
In terms of customer base, VictorOps is going after an increasingly large market.
“Anyone with an IT infrastructure that will feel pain if part of it isn’t working could be a customer for us,” Vernon said. “What we’re focused on initially is SAAS software services companies like the ones we’ve owned, because we know the pain point there is so acute,” Vernon said.
For them, the selling point is how much an outage can cost a company in lost business.
“You could pay for our platform for the entire year with [the amount of revenue lost during] one outage,” he said.
Marketing wise, VictorOps is deliberately going after IT guys who feel they’re the unsung heroes everyone turns to when disaster strikes.
While in stealth mode, the VictorOps website was understandably light on specifics about the product. Instead it used words like duty, victory, brothers, and war stories. Its oak leaf logo recalls the symbols used in military decorations and insignia.
The branding might bemuse outsiders, but the operations people who’ve built a unique camaraderie trading 3 a.m. phone calls get it, Vernon said.
“That’s how those guys actually are. Those teams are really tight knit. It’s a little bit like being in a foxhole together,” he said.
