Startup Spotlight #71: Brev

Brev helps you build a production server in seconds, without worrying about frameworks, hosting, deploying, or scaling.

Jan 11, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Nader Khalil, co-founder and CEO of Brev, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Brev is a developer environment that lets you focus on your code, rather than configuring databases, deploying, hosting, or scaling. You just write the code that belongs in your project and Brev will code and deploy the rest. Anything written on Brev can be ejected onto open-source standards, so you’re never stuck with vendor lock-in.

After graduating from UCSB, Khalil worked at Workday, where he saw their proprietary programming language which the way his senior engineer put it, “was the only developer environment where you could wake up at 9, start coding, and deploy your app by 5 pm”. This was really powerful. Khalil later quit to start Paneau (YC W20), which was doing really well until the pandemic forced them to pivot. While building Paneau, he was always frustrated by how much bandwidth the infrastructure, hosting, scaling continued to take— he wanted to build features our customers were demanding, not solving AWS issues. Khalil really understood the true power behind that Workday dev environment, hence Brev.

Startup Spotlight: Brev

Brev founder Nader Khalil.

Problem: There’s just way too much friction in today’s development process. Writing your server-side code is only half the battle.

Market: There are 21 million software engineers, at our average subscription brings a TAM of $5B.

Solution: Brev is a developer environment that completely abstracts databases, deploying, hosting, and scaling. Just focus on your code.

Team: The team has worked together for years - Nader and Alec are family friends, which is a huge perk. Founder arguments never get personal, and we can cut the bullshit.

Recent Success:

Khalil: Building just enough. We look at our V1 and cringe, but they say if you aren’t embarrassed of your v1, you launched too late. We didn’t know if we were on to something— this was definitely something that we wanted but were there two or three of us? We built a very raw… toy and presented it as a product. We got enthusiastic feedback and people wanted to use it right away but it was so far from ready. But we got the validation we needed! We sat down for 2 weeks and built the MVP. We’d onboard two people, get so much feedback watching them use Brev, return to our keyboards for a few days implementing all the feedback. Rinsed and repeated! Now the product is ready for production-level apps and we’re steadily onboarding more users.

Recent Struggle:

Khalil: But on a real, the more we build, the more there is to build. We're a small team so we don't have the bandwidth to build everything we want, and moving with calculated precision is tough. There is a beauty to constraint, however! We're forced to only build what's absolutely necessary.

Founder Advice:

Khalil: Stay optimistic! You could do all the right things, and still be in a really shitty situation. This was the case with us and Paneau. We were moving every metric up and to the right before the pandemic. April was a dark month as we tried navigating this. Ultimately, success is luck, but the harder you work, the luckier you get. You’ll never be worse off in the future because of a mistake today. So just have fun and keep going. :)

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Khalil: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Evan Conrad, Founder of Room Service: Room Service is making the world's best multiplayer engine.
Joseph Nelson, Founder of Roboflow: Roboflow enables your company to solve hard problems with computer vision.
Victor Zhang, Founder of Orbiter: Orbiter helps companies never miss an issue impacting their revenue or users again.

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