The software industry moves at a notoriously fast pace, so working to maximum productivity is essential for every developer. Unfortunately, software companies across the world experience a common barrier to productivity: slow and inefficient Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines. It was this developer issue that led three former students of the University of Waterloo – Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru – to launch a startup with the power to solve this problem. By combining their software skills, experience, and knowledge, the trio was able to deliver a solution to disrupt this major barrier to developer productivity.
Combining knowledge and experience: the birth of Blacksmith
After meeting at the University of Waterloo, JP, Maru, and Aayush began forging careers in the software industry. Maru and Aayush launched their careers at a database management software provider, and JP began his at a high-growth company, Faire.
While working in their respective roles, the graduates experienced software infrastructure challenges first-hand, observing that CI pipelines were particularly inefficient. During his time working at Faire, JP’s work on search infrastructure was continually disrupted by slow CI pipelines. He noted that these slower feedback loops not only have a major impact on productivity, but that slow CI can further impact businesses by delaying how quickly bug fixes can be rolled out to users. Meanwhile, in their own work, Maru and Aayush made an important discovery: that by using gaming CPUs, it was possible to speed up CI.
This first-hand experience of the delays that CI pipelines cause, and the knowledge that JP, Maru, and Aayush gathered during their early careers proved to be the catalyst needed to solve one of the software industry’s most frustrating issues. This inspired JP, Maru, and Aayush to co-found Blacksmith.
“We realized that slow CI pipelines were an endemic problem throughout the software industry and a major deterrent to productivity for millions of developers worldwide,” explained the co-founders. “We realized we had the ideal skillsets to solve this problem and had a unique insight into how to substantially improve the speed of CI pipelines”
Blacksmith’s innovative approach
The problem of inefficient CI pipelines isn’t a new issue. For a very long time DevOps teams have found that CI pipelines are a significant drain on productivity. However, this wasn’t an issue solved by a software giant. Instead, it took the fresh thinking of Blacksmith to find an innovative solution to this persistent problem.
Blacksmith may have begun as a small startup, but it has disrupted developer productivity on a huge scale. So, what makes Blacksmith’s approach different? The use of consumer-grade hardware is key to their innovative approach. Using gaming CPUs has proved to be a major breakthrough that significantly speeds up CI workflows. This enables DevOps teams to build and test software at double the previous speed. Crucially, this approach is not only faster than using server-grade hardware, it also saves a considerable amount of money.
Companies who adopt Blacksmith’s unique approach are able to run their CI twice as fast and achieve an impressive cost saving of between 50% and 75%. Blacksmith’s innovation clearly delivers tangible results with significant benefits for developers.
Leveling the playing field: the power of small startups vs large companies
In an industry dominated by global giants, Blacksmith stands out for being a startup that’s small in size, but big on ambition and ideas. They are proof that you don’t need to be a huge company to disrupt the status quo.
Identifying a pain point and exploring ways to solve it efficiently is more important than the size of the organization. This is proven by the way that Blacksmith, as a small startup, developed their innovative solution. “The idea for Blacksmith around building verticalized compute infra for CI workloads and using consumer gaming CPUs came from two observations,” the co-founders explain. “JP saw his former employer move just CI workloads from one cloud provider to another, for saving on costs – this showed that CI workloads could be unbundled and didn’t have a lock-in like egress fees associated with it. Maru and Aayush noticed that building database software on their gaming CPUs was significantly faster than doing so on a remote builder or even their laptops. Blacksmith was founded on these two key observations.”
Entering Y Combinator
Entering Y Combinator is a dream for many entrepreneurs. For Blacksmith’s co-founders, this dream came true when they were accepted onto the highly-competitve W24 batch. This incredible achievement saw the team make it through 27,000 applications and a less than 1% acceptance rate.
Standing out among thousands of other startups isn’t easy. However, Blacksmith achieved this by demonstrating that they had a strong problem-solution fit, and were able to clearly articulate both the problem and the disruptive solutions they had to resolve it. Demonstrating that they were a proven team with extensive expertise, combined with a proven solution to the problem, also helped to cement their acceptance onto Y Combinator.
After their acceptance into YC, Blacksmith has some top tips for others hoping to join the program:
- Validate your idea with clear conviction of your aims.
- Align your existing expertise with the solution you’re pitching.
- Launch quickly.
- Make thorough preparations for the interview with clear, concise responses.
- YC values strong potential, so apply even if you feel it may be ‘too early’ to do so.
Inspiring entrepreneurs: key takeaways
Blacksmith’s story serves as an inspiration to anyone with a dream of founding a startup. The size of your startup doesn’t need to be a barrier to success. There are opportunities to be found even in the software industry, which is dominated by global organizations.
Future startups can emulate Blacksmith’s success by following their blueprint and keeping the following key takeaways in mind:
- Identify pain points and focus on a niche area.
- Develop a deep understanding of your potential customers.
- Stay determined as you ideate and experiment with solutions.
Leveraging your ability to stay focused and experience the pain points first-hand offers small startups a significant advantage when creating disruptive solutions to big issues.
VentureBeat newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
