When Resourcely co-founder and CEO Travis McPeak was working at Netflix, he recognized a significant tension that existed between security and speed. If you move fast, you really do tend to break things and security suffers. While at Netflix, he helped build a system where security was baked in.
He knew security was essential, but he also knew his team couldn’t be a blocker to speed and innovation. He and his team wanted to relieve that tension by automating it, so developers could just concentrate on writing code with the confidence that the security would be there.
Eventually, he decided to team up with his former colleague Aladdin Almubayed, who previously led security at Robinhood, Netflix and Verizon, to start Resourcely to bring that same kind of solution they developed at Netflix to the masses. Today the company announced an $8 million seed round.
McPeak says that the idea is to make it easy to write secure code by building in security policies that guide developers in an automated way to make sure it’s safe and secure.
“The goal is to make developers’ lives way simpler and easier than what they’re used to [when it comes to security]. We want to to allow them to move as fast as they want to move without having to interact with security teams or DevOps teams, while still making sure that when they’re actually using these cloud resources that they have the confidence that they are doing it right without also having to become an expert in these complex technologies,” he said.
Using the classic Amazon S3 bucket as an example, he says it’s easy to say you should know better than to leave it exposed, but the fact is the configuration page is multiple tabs and highly complex. Most developers aren’t experts, so Resourcely, based on whatever configuration parameters your security and compliance team have defined, fills in a lot of the information based on this set of policies greatly simplifying the process for developers.
Resource co-founders Aladdin Almubayed and Travis McPeak. Image Credits: Resourcely
Before starting the company, McPeak says that he worked briefly at Databricks after leaving Netflix, and while he liked it there, the idea for Resourcely wouldn’t go away and he decided to launch the company last year. The two co-founders only have a few employees at this point as they build out the product, but he says it’s not too early to start thinking about how to build a diverse company, especially with an immigrant co-founder who is from Jordan.
“You get this group of people with different backgrounds and experiences, and you really end up with something better. So this is always front and center in my mind, whether it’s hiring engineers, or bringing on investors, and we’re fortunate to have a great group of diverse investors involved,” he said.
Zane Lackey, general partner at investors a16z, says that the founders really understood the problem at a fundamental level. “It wasn’t just that it was the fact that Travis and his co founder had really lived this problem inside Netflix, they really had the lessons learned out of trying different approaches, seeing what actually helped developers to move at the speed that they want to move without security getting in the way, but still enabling those teams and still enabling the sort of secure defaults and secure configurations,” he said.
Today’s round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Felicis Ventures, with participation from more than 30 security leaders, operators and angel investors.