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Infisical (YC W23) Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 My name is Tony. I'm one of the co-founders of Inphysical. Inphysical is like the culmination of

00:04 like so many years of just like trying out different things, failing, learning along the way,

00:12 you know, so did that with my dual for like four or five years. And then during this last year,

00:17 doing my master's, I met Vlad as well. And so, you know, the three of us got together and,

00:23 you know, we together created an idea called Oledge.

00:27 It was like an audio social network idea, applied to YC, got rejected the first time.

00:32 And then we decided to give this kind of like one more shot after graduating.

00:38 So gave it one more shot, ran into this idea in physical, which was inspired from our previous ideas. So we actually ran into

00:48 a problem related to managing secrets, these different like environment variable configurations

00:54 while building knowledge. And so kind of because of that, you know, the idea of in physical was born.

01:01 Yeah, and then applied to YC got in, and then things just kind of took off from there.

01:06 It was closed source for two months. The MVP was actually built out in two weeks. Could work.

01:11 Like, let's give this a shot. This open core model seems promising. It seems like there are a lot of

01:15 companies and clearly proven companies like GitLab, huge companies that operate on this model,

01:22 right? It's not something like, I would say like traditional

01:27 as like a regular like B2B SaaS company,

01:30 but definitely something different,

01:31 but we were willing to experiment with it

01:33 at that point in time.

01:34 That meant, you know, making our entire code base

01:37 that we'd worked on up until then public

01:39 and putting it up on Reddit.

01:42 And so we put it up on like three four different like subreddits

01:47 and all of a sudden overnight to be honest this thing blew up so like within three days this you

01:53 know it had crossed like 1000 stars on github within like three three days or something that

01:58 like this thing was shared from reddit to different newsletters. Yeah, it was like pretty crazy.

02:06 And so I kind of at that point, we figured like, okay, this is really interesting. So like, this

02:11 was totally not supposed to happen. Initially, we didn't know how to how to operate like an

02:19 open core model, right. But over time, you gain experience. And certainly towards like now,

02:24 we're a lot more comfortable with it.

02:27 I can talk about our monetization.

02:29 OpenCore company is pretty standard.

02:30 But the way we think about it is in terms of two streams.

02:35 So you have one is people using our in-physical cloud product.

02:40 So that's the hosted or managed solution, essentially.

02:55 So that would be basically people going onto our website, making an account and just using it there. And then the second stream that we think of that these very sensitive credentials, it makes sense for a lot of people to want to host our technology on their own infrastructure and deal with their own sensitive information.

03:13 If you zoom into cloud, then we have different tiers.

03:17 We charge on like a per user per month basis.

03:45 So we have like a free tier. And our goal, of course, is to make this platform free for individuals and small teams. And as other open core companies, basically, you know, you want to ideally charge and make money off of enterprise much more. And then for self-hosted, you can use it like also for free, or you can also buy an enterprise license as well. It's something that we're still tweaking right now, to be honest,

03:51 because Inphysical is still a fairly new product on the market right now. And there's just so many things to do. And honestly, we don't have enough manpower right now to tackle all the different

03:56 initiatives. But monetization and pricing is kind of one of those things that's on our list,

04:03 in addition to all the other engineering things

04:06 that people are requesting right now.

04:09 We've thought about hiring.

04:12 We just completed our fundraise recently.

04:17 So before that's not something

04:18 that we had the capability to do, right?

04:23 But like having a small team is actually

04:25 very nice at this stage. So it allows you to really stay lean and move really quickly. So

04:32 sometimes, you know, some people say, the more people you have in your team, it's like a larger

04:39 ship, and it's actually kind of harder to steer a larger ship you know so right now it's especially in such

04:47 early stages as in physical I think it makes a lot of sense for us to stay lean right now and

04:52 you know kind of keep like a low burn and and if if talking about hiring kind of like slowly higher

05:00 but definitely not do something like higher a lot immediately that's that's definitely out of

05:06 question we're still so early in this journey to i think make in physical significantly more

05:12 accessible to everyone and that's something that we definitely want to target across

05:17 like a whole range of initiatives that you can see on our roadmap in the next like six months

05:23 that's well said. That's awesome.

05:25 Thanks for the answer here.

05:26 And could you highlight maybe any surprises

05:29 that you've had so far within open source?

05:34 Any surprises?

05:35 The whole thing was a surprise.

05:38 We have one contributor named Aki

05:39 that contributed like redesigned

05:44 basically every single component on the platform.

05:46 Went in and created like a whole set of like, here are all the buttons, the secondary buttons,

05:53 the input fields, the select field, like, you know, this is what a card, what a pop-up

05:58 will look like.

05:59 He just did, implemented the entire, re-implemented the entire standardized design system for us. And so,

06:06 you know, it just comes to show, I think, how powerful open source is, you know, in terms of

06:11 getting feedback as well as, you know, you have like collective power of so many contributors,

06:17 everyone kind of coming together for a greater cause to create something amazing.

06:22 A lot of different reasons why people contribute right and and this

06:26 you know this is like something i think i i ask contributors as well so like uh we we schedule

06:32 these different code walkthroughs for contributors um so i get a chance to actually zoom and meet

06:39 with with a lot of the contributors before they start contributing and you know these are some of the questions that I ask right um as well as like how did you find in physical and such but

06:49 you know like some people do it um just because they love they love contributing like they just

06:55 love they just do it because you know um other people do it to gain like um learning experience

07:03 so like there's some there's one contributor that I work

07:06 with right now for instance who is a student right now in college like a second year and they don't

07:14 have they have like experience in the school academic setting writing different programming

07:20 functions and stuff but not as much in terms of actually shipping like production

07:25 software, let's say, you know, to real users and stuff. And so part of their motivation as well

07:31 is to actually like partake in a real project that's being used by real people and, and learn,

07:39 you know, all the different aspects and they get to do like and and we're super flexible too so they get to

07:45 contribute anywhere like whether it be some people want to do back end and then sometimes it's like

07:51 for instance this guy is like he was working on back end stuff and now he wants to transition

07:55 over to front and we're like cool yeah go for it and and you know the whole time we we also like

08:01 advise and we give them tips and stuff as well and so learning experience is

08:05 like another another big part of it too and and that's a highlight here i mean i think there's a

08:11 lot more room for for this to become for this to be a more usual phenomenon college students

08:15 contributing to open source because as you said like what are the chances they have for shipping

08:19 you know production software at the best the summer internship with like a small you know

08:23 scrappy startup right so that's i mean right and and the thing is there they might they might be confined

08:29 to like one small function for instance but in our case it's like you come to us and we're like

08:36 here's a whole list of things like pretty much like look at all of these github issues and it's

08:42 like outside of these github issues like you can pick out an item from a roadmap

08:46 or these other five different things

08:49 that we can like propose as well.

08:51 And so it's like so flexible and it's awesome.

08:53 You know, when we were starting out,

08:55 you know, there was one founder that we reached out to

09:00 that we didn't think would like answer.

09:02 And they actually like answered and they helped

09:05 you know hit me up on twitter uh dang tony 98 um you can also join the slack channel as well i'm on

09:13 there 24 7 i mean last thought would would just be like uh believe in yourself and and you can do it

09:21 you know it's it's i don't know. I just feel like having graduated from college

09:28 like quite recently,

09:29 I would say that from what I observed,

09:32 I didn't think there were enough people

09:35 that were as serious about entrepreneurship

09:37 and startups as a possible career path.

09:40 And sometimes like it takes talking to more other founders

09:44 and being exposed to that community more to realize like there are really people out there that are building awesome stuff, you know, are building things and making careers out of startups.

09:56 So I would really encourage more people to believe in themselves if that's the path that they want to do, then go for it.

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