Startup Spotlight #9: Doppler

Doppler is the first Universal Secrets Manager.

Jul 07, 2020

Author’s Note: For my American readers, I hope you had a Happy 4th of July!

I got the chance to speak with Brian Vallelunga, founder and CEO of Doppler, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Founded in a small apartment in the Design District of San Francisco, Doppler started off as a crypto machine learning marketplace. After 8 months spent attempting to get this concept off the ground, Vallelunga decided to shut it down.

After deciding it was time to move on from the Blockchain project, he took some time to reflect on the experience. Looking at all the pain points Vallelunga had faced when running the crypto project, secrets management surprisingly kept popping up due to everything being such a manual process. From controlling access with contractors to frequent outages due to human error, it felt like he was back in the analog age. When Vallelunga looked for tools to help alleviate the pain, the available products in the marketplace seemed too complex. So, he decided to build a new secrets management tool -- an easy to use product every developer could fall in love with, not just the super senior security engineers.

Startup Spotlight: Doppler

Doppler cofounder and CEO Brian Vallelunga.

Problem: Managing software secrets such as API keys and database URLs is a painful experience for developers. Secrets end up scattered everywhere, from your laptop to production servers and everywhere in between; it’s a very manual and error-prone process to keep all of your locations in sync.

Market: The market is massive, every developer and company that has secrets or configuration variables should be using Doppler.

Solution: We are boldly going where no secrets manager has gone before, starting with an experience every developer can love. Our Universal Secrets Manager becomes a team's central source of truth from local development to production for every language, stack, and infrastructure.

Team: Our team is composed of highly experienced and passionate engineers focused on developer tools and security. They have boldly led teams at Uber, Instagram, and BlackRock.

Recent Success:

Vallelunga: I have a knack for curating passionate people with deep expertise and bringing them into the company. This has afforded Doppler the ability to hire fewer people while retaining a high work output.

Recent Struggle:

Vallelunga: Saying no. Part of being a founder is knowing what to work on and what not to. Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by the number of concurrent tasks I am responsible for. At some point, I intend to hire myself out of all operational responsibilities, so that I can focus purely on pointing the ship in the right direction and maximizing its speed.

Founder Advice:

Vallelunga: Dare to be bold, to be opinionated, to go against the grain. The best products are the sum of strong opinions backed by data. Be different instead of better, it’s far more defensible and gives your brand an identity. The world doesn’t need more of the same and people listen when something unique is brought to the market. Take a risk, that’s what startups are about!

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

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

Patrick Mrozowski, Founder of Point: Point is the debit card you'll actually love, with the most personalized and rewarding spending experience.
Gabriella DeFlorio, Founder of Prelay: Prelay is a collaborative operating system built for sales and support teams.
Zach Waterfield, Founder of Kopa: Kopa is an online housing marketplace that enables renters to easily find monthly rentals and housemates for 1-16 months.

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