How An Awful, Misspelled Presentation Launched The Most Important Startup You've Never Heard Of | ||
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A tiny startup called Docker, which launched a mere 19 months ago and gives its software away for free, has become a huge industry phenom. The biggest names in tech have been calling it up and asking it to be their partner. In the past few months Dell, HP, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware and others have all asked to join forces with this 31-employee company. On Thursday, Amazon got cheers at its customers when it announced it would be supporting Docker, too. This has been a shockingly crazy ride for the startup's founder, 31-year-old Solomon Hykes. He started working on Docker in 2008 in his mother's Paris basement, as a tiny side thing that he thought only a handful of other people would ever care about. Hello Wowlrd?The ride began in as awkward a way imaginable. "The way we introduced Docker, it did not go as planned at all," he laughed. "We had this little project, not ready by any stretch of the imagination. We would go to someone we knew, show it, get feedback, work on it." He had three other guys helping him. They showed it to more and more friends, 5, 10, 20 until they wanted to demo it beyond people they knew. So they signed up to give a "nerdy session" at a tech conference and thought maybe 30 people would show up, Hykes describes. "We didn't think we were cool at all," Hykes laughs. The session was something called a "Lightenting Talk" at a huge developer's conference called PyCon. It turned out that Lightening Talks were a big deal at Pycon. "But no one told me. I got up on stage and there were like 900 people there, it was the main track. I didn't have anything worthy to show. Just this little 'Hello World' thing. I was so nervous, I misspelled Hello World," he laughs. "Inexplicably people went crazy, nuts over the demo. It got leaked on Hacker News. That was our launch. We did not plan any of this." Here he is, on stage, with the awful, misspelled demo that people loved.
Why Docker Scares VMwareThe demo was for something called a "container" used to develop apps that run on cloud computing. The cloud makes it easy for people to run their apps on all sorts of devices. But writing an app that can handle being moved around so much is really tough to do. "If you are a software developer today, chances are you are not trying to build a desktop application, running in one computer at a time. You are probably involved in building something like Gmail or Uber, something that's just running out there on the internet, everywhere and nowhere," Hykes explains. "You need your app to be running on many machines at the same time. As those machines come and go, the app has to evolve and expand to new machines and move around," he says. Until Docker, everyone was coming up with their own ways to solve this problem. But Docker wraps each piece of app into something called a container. You can change the container without changing the piece of an app. The container is smart enough to know where it (what kind of cloud server) and automatically adjust itself so all the parts of an app can float around the internet and still always work together.
Docker is disrupting that virtual machine tech, and threatening one of the kingpins in the enterprise tech world, VMware. VMware isn't waiting around for that to happen. In August, as container mania started taking hold, it got on the phone with Docker to strike up a partnership, Hykes says. The two companies are now working together to build a product that marries VMware's cloud tech with Docker. But there's still some risk that Docker could replace, not compliment. Docker just poached Marianna Tessel, one of VMware's most prestigious early engineers, from her long term position at VMware. She's now heading up Docker's engineering. Ingenius Business ModelDocker also has a really clever business model. It's an open source project, so it gives the software away for free. Most open source companies earn money by selling subscriptions to a special version of their product that comes with support, or special features and they charge for things like training. Docker is doing all that but it's doing something else, from the days when it was DotCloud. It's building a service that's a cross between a GitHub (which hosts software projects in the cloud) and an Amazon (which runs software in the cloud). The part that makes Docker containers so smart is a cloud service running on Docker's own cloud. When developers use Docker for important apps, they pay Docker for this service. The more apps running Docker, the more money Docker makes. "Think about Docker in two parts," he says, meaning the free software plus the cloud. "Compare it to a smartphone. It's way less fun without a data network around it." $10 Million In VC funds And Jerry YangAfter that presentation put Docker on the map, Hykes and his DotCloud cofounders pushed DotCloud aside and joined Ycombinator to build out Docker.
And things took off from there. Docker has been downloaded over 50 million times, it has spawned 128 user groups in 43 countries, there are over 700 developers voluntarily working on it, with 15,000 third-party projects on GitHub using Docker and some big names using it too, like eBay, Spotify, Cloudflare, Yandex, Cambridge Healthcare and Yelp. Yahoo founder Jerry Yang also invested and joined Docker's board. "He's a great guy. I remember being so impressed. Your talking to a billionaire that changed the internet. He's so approachable and talks to you about every day problems as a founder," Hykes describes. The way things are going for Hykes and Docker, he's heading toward an internet-changing, super financially successful future of his own. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Before Docker, the closest thing to a container was a tech dominated by VMware called a "virtual machine" (VM). VMware was founded in 1998, long before the mobile revolution, to solve a different problem. It tricks a single computer server into hosting lots of different apps, with different operating systems (like a Linux computer running a Windows app).
Smart move. This year, Docker raised $55 million from several top tier VCs including super angel Ron Conway. Defense Secretary Could Consider Recommendation For More Ground Troops In Iraq | ||
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Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told CNN in an interview Saturday that he would consider recommendations to send ground troops to Iraq from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. However, Hagel insisted the troops would not be in a combat role and would only be used to help local forces find targets. "There will be no American combat troops in Iraq or Syria," Hagel said. Hagel's comment is the latest in a series of shifting statements from officials in President Barack Obama's administration about what role US troops will play in the fight against the jihadist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in Syria and Iraq. Obama has repeatedly insisted the growing number of American forces sent to Iraq would not have a "combat mission." At the G20 Summit in Australia, he said Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, "has not advised me that I should be sending U.S. troops to fight," However, on Thursday, Dempsey, who traveled to Iraq on Saturday to evaluate the situation on the ground, told the House Armed Services Committee he was "certainly considering" using US troops to help retake the city of Mosul from ISIS. Dempsey previously suggested he could recommend using American troops to "accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets" in September. Obama pushed back against those comments the following day when he said he would not commit US troops "to fighting another ground war in Iraq." In his interview with CNN, Hagel said he did not "foresee a circumstance when it would be in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent." "If we get to any other variation of recommendations from General Dempsey, we will deal with it, but we are not there yet," said Hagel. At the G20 Summit, Obama would not completely rule out the possibility of using combat troops to fight ISIS. However, he suggested it would require a rather extreme turn of events. "There are always circumstances, in which the United States might need to deploy ground troops," Obama said. "If we discovered that ISIL had gotten possession of a nuclear weapon, and we had to run an operation to get it out of their hands, then yes, you can anticipate that not only would Chairman Dempsey recommend me sending U.S. ground troops to get that weapon out of their hands, but I would order it." Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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How An Awful, Misspelled Presentation Launched The Most Important Startup You've Never Heard Of | ||
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A tiny startup called Docker, which launched a mere 19 months ago and gives its software away for free, has become a huge industry phenom. The biggest names in tech have been calling it up and asking it to be their partner. In the past few months Dell, HP, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware and others have all asked to join forces with this 31-employee company. On Thursday, Amazon got cheers at its customers when it announced it would be supporting Docker, too. This has been a shockingly crazy ride for the startup's founder, 31-year-old Solomon Hykes. He started working on Docker in 2008 in his mother's Paris basement, as a tiny side thing that he thought only a handful of other people would ever care about. Hello Wowlrd?The ride began in as awkward a way imaginable. "The way we introduced Docker, it did not go as planned at all," he laughed. "We had this little project, not ready by any stretch of the imagination. We would go to someone we knew, show it, get feedback, work on it." He had three other guys helping him. They showed it to more and more friends, 5, 10, 20 until they wanted to demo it beyond people they knew. So they signed up to give a "nerdy session" at a tech conference and thought maybe 30 people would show up, Hykes describes. "We didn't think we were cool at all," Hykes laughs. The session was something called a "Lightenting Talk" at a huge developer's conference called PyCon. It turned out that Lightening Talks were a big deal at Pycon. "But no one told me. I got up on stage and there were like 900 people there, it was the main track. I didn't have anything worthy to show. Just this little 'Hello World' thing. I was so nervous, I misspelled Hello World," he laughs. "Inexplicably people went crazy, nuts over the demo. It got leaked on Hacker News. That was our launch. We did not plan any of this." Here he is, on stage, with the awful, misspelled demo that people loved.
Why Docker Scares VMwareThe demo was for something called a "container" used to develop apps that run on cloud computing. The cloud makes it easy for people to run their apps on all sorts of devices. But writing an app that can handle being moved around so much is really tough to do. "If you are a software developer today, chances are you are not trying to build a desktop application, running in one computer at a time. You are probably involved in building something like Gmail or Uber, something that's just running out there on the internet, everywhere and nowhere," Hykes explains. "You need your app to be running on many machines at the same time. As those machines come and go, the app has to evolve and expand to new machines and move around," he says. Until Docker, everyone was coming up with their own ways to solve this problem. But Docker wraps each piece of app into something called a container. You can change the container without changing the piece of an app. The container is smart enough to know where it (what kind of cloud server) and automatically adjust itself so all the parts of an app can float around the internet and still always work together.
Docker is disrupting that virtual machine tech, and threatening one of the kingpins in the enterprise tech world, VMware. VMware isn't waiting around for that to happen. In August, as container mania started taking hold, it got on the phone with Docker to strike up a partnership, Hykes says. The two companies are now working together to build a product that marries VMware's cloud tech with Docker. But there's still some risk that Docker could replace, not compliment. Docker just poached Marianna Tessel, one of VMware's most prestigious early engineers, from her long term position at VMware. She's now heading up Docker's engineering. Ingenius Business ModelDocker also has a really clever business model. It's an open source project, so it gives the software away for free. Most open source companies earn money by selling subscriptions to a special version of their product that comes with support, or special features and they charge for things like training. Docker is doing all that but it's doing something else, from the days when it was DotCloud. It's building a service that's a cross between a GitHub (which hosts software projects in the cloud) and an Amazon (which runs software in the cloud). The part that makes Docker containers so smart is a cloud service running on Docker's own cloud. When developers use Docker for important apps, they pay Docker for this service. The more apps running Docker, the more money Docker makes. "Think about Docker in two parts," he says, meaning the free software plus the cloud. "Compare it to a smartphone. It's way less fun without a data network around it." $10 Million In VC funds And Jerry YangAfter that presentation put Docker on the map, Hykes and his DotCloud cofounders pushed DotCloud aside and joined Ycombinator to build out Docker.
And things took off from there. Docker has been downloaded over 50 million times, it has spawned 128 user groups in 43 countries, there are over 700 developers voluntarily working on it, with 15,000 third-party projects on GitHub using Docker and some big names using it too, like eBay, Spotify, Cloudflare, Yandex, Cambridge Healthcare and Yelp. Yahoo founder Jerry Yang also invested and joined Docker's board. "He's a great guy. I remember being so impressed. Your talking to a billionaire that changed the internet. He's so approachable and talks to you about every day problems as a founder," Hykes describes. The way things are going for Hykes and Docker, he's heading toward an internet-changing, super financially successful future of his own. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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