Abhi Yerra

Category: Uncategorized

  • Reorienting Building Ventures

    I think I’ve been thinking about products wrong. I don’t think a venture should encompass everything but it does get more valuable when there is more added to it. A single site selling widget x is less useful than a website selling x, y, z. However, some people may just want widget x and don’t need y and z.

    The question is how do you build ventures that can do both. If we sell x, y, z then we need to segment but what if the thing you are selling addresses different markets?

    I think it may make sense to build the larger sites then figure out which features are popular and build the unbundled versions. However, I haven’t figured out if this is something I want to do. Overall, having a larger bundled site provides a lot of diversification and the customer has a feature list they can use.

    Likely a better approach.

  • MakeProspect as a Studio Project Template

    I’ve been trying to figure out what MakeProspect is as it pertains to opsZero. It is useful, but is not a part of opsZero. MakeProspect is a hobby. I was initially under the impression it would be a simple spreadsheet that I would sell but I don’t think that makes much sense. It would be much more useful as a content site.

    One of the main problems that I have is everything should be easy for me, but this may not be easy for the customer. Sending an email containing job posts as an Excel is easy for me but not super useful for the customer.

    In that regard I am changing the model of Studio a bit. I think the ideal model for MakeProspect and other Studio projects is to use WordPress for almost all the heavy lifting. I am good at the ideation stage but once it is up and running I’d like to spin it out as fast as possible. I do not want to necessarily work on these projects for the long term.

    In that regard a hand off of the project should be straightforward:

    • WordPress site that someone can modify quickly and is independent.
    • Git Repo with a microservice that may power the site.
    • Google Sheet containing a template making it easy for a business development person to come in and take over the project.

    A Studio template should contain the following:

    • Competitors. If we are building something it needs to be competing against someone. We need to have a list of the competitors that the product is going against.
    • Sales Leads. We need to have a set of sales leads that we are going after.
    • Marketing Locations. Setup marketing locations for where we promote.
    • Persona. Who is the singular target for this product?
    • KPIs. We need a KPI Dashboard that is added to the site that is only available to the admins.

    Why do it this way? With $50/year WordPress ends up being exceedingly cost effective for launching and promoting a new site. By using microservices it is vastly easy to add what we need to automate the site. If we need more power we can add the bigger subscription. WordPress and a Google Sheet also makes selling super simple to sell. We can hire someone and give them both and tell them to run with it.

  • What is YerraCo?

    YerraCo treats and manages capital and looks at all investments internal and external from a financial view. Our goal is to follow in the footsteps of Koch Industries who take opportunities bets on new investments. We treat our ventures and investments as bets based on data and treat each entity we have from the perspective of private equity.

    The company then is in the act of derisking investments as much as possible to optimize for returns.

    To accomplish this our activities include:

    • Risk Management. Understand where the risks are in our business and seek to uncover them.
    • Global Macro. Understand the macro situation of the wider world and understand how those affect our businesses.
    • Opportunities. We find opportunities with a bottom up approach through our businesses.
      • MakeProspect uncovers opportunities by following trends in jobs and sales.
      • opsZero uncovers trends by performing work for our customers and based on what they request.

    With this we invest in the following:

    • Ventures. We build businesses internally if they are asset-lite.
    • Equities. We invest externally in public markets.
    • Commodities. We invest in commodities based on geopolitical macro.

  • Kubernetes, Microservices, Compliance

    As I look at our current Solutions on our website with DevOps, AI+DataOps, Cost Optimization, Modernization, and Compliance & Security it makes me wonder what we are pitching. It seems like we are trying to do too many things and I think a potential customer would also be confused. Each of those things is different with a Venn diagram that connects loosely.

    I think we need a clear, crisp pitch. We do Kubernetes, Microservices and Compliance. I think this will make sales vastly easier to do and will allow us to be better known with our partners. We are already doing the pitch so we are not adding anything new and are really just bringing our strengths.

    Some reasons I think we should simplify to these three:

    • The existing solutions that we have are backward looking. We seem to say we do a bunch of things that are now common place and are done by others. The solutions just feel like an old company instead of a forward leader we want the brand to represent.
    • DevOps and Cost Optimization are redundant if we just say we do Kubernetes. Kubernetes entails both cost optimization and DevOps for us. They should not be separate as our goal now is to have one Kubernetes cluster per AWS account. It no longer serves us to have cost optimization be a separate function but a part of our Kubernetes offering.
    • Modernization and DataOps+AI are also redundant. We can just label them as Microservices with a tag line of building with Data and AI. Modernization is too big and doesn’t differentiate us in any way. We should just consolidate them. We provide and can build microservices.
    • Compliance. We should not say Compliance and Security just compliance. Security is pretty vast and trying to incorporate all of it would be a crap shoot. We should narrow our focus to just Compliance as it differentiates us from others in that it focuses us on the Cloud infrastructure. We do not want to do MDM and device management as that is not our strength.

    This is why I think Kubernetes, Microservices, Compliance should be our pitch.

    • It is easy to remember. We are the Kubernetes and Microservices people.
    • It is forward looking. Kubernetes is stable and legacy infrastructure will move to it. It future proofs us by building out moat around a new capability that others don’t have.
    • Modernization was the move from onprem to the Cloud. Microservices are what happens when you are on the Cloud and want to make your apps more efficient. While we may do the onprem to Cloud work we should frame it from a future looking term of microservices as opposed to the early cloud migration term of modernization.
    • It fits with our Platform vision more clearly. Kubernetes, Microservices and Compliance fits a lot clearly with our cross sharing of resources that we want to build with the Platform.
    • Makes it easier to hire people who know what they are selling. By being focused we can create a common messaging that we can use to sell. The current units is pretty large.
    • It helps us figure out who we need to hire for engineering. By doing too many things it makes it much harder to figure out who to hire. By focusing on Kubernetes, Microservices and Compliance our hiring becomes a lot clearer.

  • API First

    I generally hate having to deal with interfaces and think that if I build an API then others should be able to use it with their existing tools. I have come to the realization that not doing this and focusing on consumer focused offerings is an absolute waste of time for me. It is just not our core competency and something I should not spend a lot of time around.

    I want to sell an API not something that I have to build a UX around. Building a single API is better than creating a dozen bad products. We are looking to create offerings that are consistent and add value to our ecosystem and consumer apps are not a good use case for us.

    However, by building API focused products we can encourage others to build on top and create content around how to do so.

  • Decoupling Customers

    Currently, System6 has a single customer model that links to all the products. This customer model is tied to the Lead in Close CRM. Unfortunately, I’ve found this centralized Customer object a bit difficult to scale past services. We may have 100s of customers for a product but only a couple dozen for services.

    To alleviate this problem each product will have its own customer and will be loosely tied to the Close CRM Lead. This results in each product being built as a silo with its own PnL.

    An additional benefit of this is we are becoming “microservices” in that each app in Django acts as a microservice with very small scope to make it easy to test and maintain.

  • Focus only on AWS

    While we can do Azure and GCP we are much slower at accomplishing tasks on those Clouds versus AWS. So we should deprecate GCP and Azure for the services we provide for opsZero and only provide them insofar as we do migrations from GCP and Azure to AWS.

    Azure and GCP have completely different models for how they handle IAM which is 90% of the difficult of managing the Cloud. Even if we can get the resources up in a repeatable manner using Terraform, the access control has been the most difficult to maintain. While one can say AWS IAM is also complex, we have experience with how it works so can debug it much easier than Azure or GCP.

    Division of energy. Trying to make AWS work well and integrating our products to work with AWS well is a better ROI than trying to build for Azure and GCP. Or if we do provide resources within those Clouds we should run resources in them as opsZero and provide an API for customers to use. By focusing on AWS we can reduce costs and deliver faster. This should be like how Southwest only uses 737s. It brings down the cost to hire, and increases delivery velocity.

    Migrations to AWS are okay. We should be okay with migrating companies to AWS from Azure and GCP. We just treat those Clouds as legacy and do the migrations.

    We will get deeper into AWS and will not build tooling for Azure or GCP.

  • Long Term Energy Shortage

    As I start collecting information on energy markets it seems more and more that we are going to run into an energy shortage starting in 2025.

    • The shale plays no longer make sense as interest rates are too high to be profitable. This means we will continue seeing the consolidation that we are seeing with the likes of Hess and Pioneer Natural Resources.
    • Shale wells get most of their oil in the first 2 years so the wells that were launched in 2022 are where we are getting the energy. The number of wells hasn’t gone up so there will likely see a shortage in 2025 as there are no replacement wells.
    • Middle East is in a precarious situation with the Red Sea where Russian oil likely can’t make it out to India and China.

    In all likelihood this means we are in a long term decline in oil and the real outcome we should hope for is energy efficiency being the name of the game. This means any opportunity to cut energy usage will be the primary driver, as that will be the limiting factor.

  • Studio is Multiple Products

    A Studio product can be any number of variations of the base datasets that we sell. The reason for this is that a piece of data can be sold to multiple people and each person can have their own separate requirements.

    So having one to one mapping of opsZero product to Studio product doesn’t make sense. We need a one to many relationship that ensures that we can build multiple brands.

  • Building Businesses on my Phone

    I’ve always wanted to get to a point where I could run a business on my phone. Where I’d enter some stuff and bam a new product with a domain I could launch. It is something I’ve been really excited about for a long time, but I wanted to do it cheaply with a mostly hosted solution.

    I finally found a solution that allows me to use Cloudflare Workers + WordPress.com to write pages on my phone and create entirely new businesses quickly. I am elated as I get the simplicity of creating pages with WordPress, pay for it once, and don’t have to manage multiple sites.

    For example, this site abhiyerra.com is hosted on a WordPress.com site but using Cloudflare for routing from yerra.co/api/abhiyerra. Each page in WordPress converts to a different webapps. Some things such as the blog are shared.

    So what is the purpose of doing this?

    opsZero provides Cloud Infrastructure for businesses. This is a big project working across industries and is focused on IT and Engineering. However, there are massive amounts of problems across industries that can use Cloud Technology to improve their efficiency which aren’t being addressed because the total addressable market is capped at a couple thousands of dollars a month.

    These are projects that can be built with simple Python scripts, hosted using Google or Microsoft, paid with using Gumroad, and are made for consumers. None of these projects should take more than a few hours to build and launch.

    The idea behind these projects is not so much make a bunch of money, but to learn about selling to different industries using small apps. Can I build to solve a bunch of small problems quickly?