In The Hub, quite a few stealth mode startups are already piquing our interest. Add Datawire to the list: While we still know little about the Boston company—the Twitter profile for Datawire simply says, “build resilient, composable microservices fast”—the details we do have suggest a promising company in the works.
For one, the company is co-founded by a couple of seasoned tech vets. Richard Li—who’s a computer science MIT grad—was previously responsible for product and strategy at Duo Security, a cloud authentication company. And before that, he acted as senior director of product management at Boston-based cybersecurity firm Rapid7.
Meanwhile, CTO Rafael Schloming, who also holds an MIT computer science degree, was a principal software engineer at Red Hat, where he met Li.
Four months ago, Rapid7 CEO Corey Thomas invested in Datawire, alongside Boston Syndicates. The amount of the round hasn't been disclosed, but Thomas’ typical investment is around $50,000, with a minimum of $10,000, according to AngelList. FKA-run Boston Syndicates invests up to $250,000 per deal.
In a phone interview, Li told me that Thomas has been a “tremendous mentor.”
A supportive community
It may seem strange for some companies to be so supportive of their former employees’ ventures, but that’s what Li says makes Boston such a great place for startups to thrive.
“There’s a lot of activity, but it’s not as overt as it it is in California,” he told me. “What you’ll start to see is that a lot of the folks that joined at companies like Rapid7 early on are going to eventually go off and do their own thing. That’s because when you’re small, you’re looking for people who have an entrepreneurial spirit...They have an itch, and at some point they’re going to scratch it.”
The key early on, Li says, is to get reputable peers to take a look at what you’re doing trying to do, with a critical eye. Luckily, Boston's entrepreneurs and startups are open to helping one another out—as long as you’re not working on something that’s competitive for them, obviously. And so that’s precisely the approach Li has taken with Datawire, gathering feedback from people at respected firms like HubSpot, Veracode, Bit9—all of which have seen impressive growth, and now are willing to reciprocate for early-stage ventures.
“These companies understand that not too long ago, they were in the same position I was in,” Li said.
The stealth advantage
Part of the reason this strategy works is the fact that Datawire—formerly known as Kinetic—has remained in stealth mode for the past year. Li noted that he opted to take this route not merely for competitive reasons, but moreso to have the luxury of refining the idea—which is based on building microservices/hyper-distributed IT systems more easily—before it goes public.
“We’re still evolving, and trying to explain exactly what we’re doing,” said Li. “If I had come out with it six months or a year ago, what I put up on the website would now be completely out of date.”
So he’s been continually iterating. And over the past three of four months, he started to gain some momentum.
“People are finally saying, ‘If you build this thing that you’re describing, I would definitely want to use it,’” Li added.
Stay tuned for more information about this stealthy startup: The plan, Li told me, is to launch in four to six weeks—ideally at the open-source ApacheCon conference in Austin.
In the meantime, the company’s first blog post offers some insight into the mission:
"IT architecture is radically changing. Microservices architectures are gaining traction, and technologies such as Docker, virtualization, and cloud services will accelerate this design pattern.
We believe that these architectural changes will also fundamentally change how data flows between systems, and are building software to help anyone understand this complexity.”
Image of distributed technology concept via Shutterstock. Image of Corey Thomas via Rapid7.
