 Okay, we're back at day two of Node Summit. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv, and we're proud to be at Node Summit. For day two of live interviews, wall-to-wall coverage, yesterday, day one, we interviewed. We've got about 20, 25 interviews of great entrepreneurs, developers, executives, really the thought leaders, and the folks really building this new community. And they're all geeks, but they're all in business to make money and do some good for the world in the development world and build great apps. Day two is a little bit different here at Node Summit. This is what they call the Node Jam. And Node Jam is where all the startups who are really playing with Node and really commercializing some of their ideas and visions into product. And so we've got great teams of people, great product opportunities, and the social community, if you will, is all here. And it's really exciting, and I'm proud to be here with theCUBE. theCUBE is siliconangle.tv's flagship telecast. We go out to the events, and we set up our HD studio. We talk to the most important, smartest people we can find, and we don't care if they're entrepreneurs, developers, executives, if they got knowledge, we want to extract that and share that with you. And we're proud to be here. And it's going to be exciting. So today's going to be pretty much a laid back, pretty much a chill environment. We're going to talk candidly with the entrepreneurs. What are they working on? And some of the hot trends and products we're seeing. So our first guest is Matt Rainey, who is the co-founder, founder of Voxer. And I'm joined with Clint Finley, who's managing editor of our new devopsangle.com, our section on siliconangle, going into the node world and understanding the operational and engineering side of it. Clint, welcome back. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. First time in, good to have you. I'm going to be a little loose. So let's just jump right in. You have the company Voxer. It's been very popular. As they say, you know, Naval from AngelList is here. He talks about social proof. You have some social proof. You have people using your app. So tell us about Voxer for the folks out there. What are some of the product features? And then share with us just some highlights of the success that you've had just recently. Sure, sure. So Voxer is, you know, it's, we call it a walkie-talkie. And it's sort of, we're trying to make a modern, like more useful way to do like walkie-talkie kind of behaviors. Like the issue that we're coming up against, now that we have these mobile phones everywhere, like everybody's got a mobile phone. It's like, you can have a phone call anytime you like, but do you actually want that? Like increasingly no. People find phone calls are, you know, they interrupt them. It's kind of a pain when you get a phone call. And so what we're trying to do is get sort of the etiquette of text messaging, but let you use your voice to do that. So it doesn't interrupt, but if you still want to be live, you can still be live. And it sounds complicated, but I mean, it's just like a walkie-talkie that works better. Before we get into some of the technical coolness of what you guys are doing with Node and everything else, which we're going to go deep dive in. Clint and I were playing with your app on Monday night, and it's really cool. And for folks out there who want to try to understand this product, it's basically a text message with voice. And for the older folks out there like me, who know about Nextel, and you see people push to talk, and then you can just chat with a talk like at a construction site or when you had people in the service business, that that was a really great product. Nextel pioneer, that kind of push-to-talk concept. Here it's a little bit different. You're doing essentially a voice message, that's a text message kind of thing to oversimplify it. That's correct. Yeah, I mean, it is voice. Like it's not transcription. It's not converting your voice into text, but it's letting you use your voice with the social etiquette of text. Like it's not interrupting you, but like voice is really nice. It conveys nuance and subtlety and just character and emotion that you just can't get with text. And so people do want to use their voice, we think. And not just always type everything. Voice is a useful way to talk to people, and it just doesn't fit in the sort of modern, kind of with the etiquette of modern mobile telephony. I mean, we know, we have theCUBE, and we have obviously audio and video, but I get taken out of context a lot of my blog posts when I do a lot of tongue-in-cheek and people are like, what are you saying? Get offended. So voice gives you that natural feeling of that. And the other thing that Clint and I were talking about when we were talking to some of the developers on that Monday night meetup, Thirsty Bear, was a lot of the times you would get hyped up in products in Silicon Valley and Draloprison. It's like an echo chamber of hype and fun sometimes. But really, when you hear average people say, oh, I love this app, it's amazing. So Clint, share your story about your friend who kind of showed you and said, you got to get on this. Oh yeah, yeah, I have a friend who, well, I've been hearing about Boxer for over a year now because you guys are using Node.js and RIOC and so the stuff that I've been following. But then I started hearing about it from my friends. You're non-technical. Yeah, from non-technical people. And yeah, they're fanatical about it. Because I had known about the app, but I had never actually even downloaded it. And so now suddenly I'm hearing not from Node.js evangelists, but from print reporters and from airline travel workers. Oh, this is great, I love to use this app while I'm driving because I don't have to look at it and I don't have to touch it. So yeah, it's definitely gaining a lot of traction outside of the tech community. And I understand you've hit some milestone numbers recently. Yeah, well, so before I deflect that question, let me also just say that hearing something like that, like what you just said, like how people are telling you about it, like as a person who writes software, like that is the absolute great, I mean, that is why we write software. So it's super great. So I just, ah. While you're happy now, tell us orically the numbers. It's definitely, well, here's what you can see. You can look in the, you can go to the iOS app store and you can look in the social networking category and you can see which has the usual suspects and you can see which position we are in and which position we've been in for almost a month, which is to say above Facebook. And I'm not to say, I mean, everybody's on Facebook, like no surprise there, but the surprise is we have been above Facebook for a long time and like lots and lots of people are downloading this app in this country and around the world. It's very cool, congratulations. I think you got lightning in a bottle and I think when we look back on this CUBE interview, we'd be like, wow, that company really went on a rocket ship. Remember us small guys when you're famous. But let's talk about the team. Let's talk about you guys up there and you guys see your write code and you're really happy but seeing the results manifest itself. Talk about the team that you guys have up within Voxer and talk about some of the talent you have. Sure, so I mean, we have, you know, we're primarily engineering focused. You know, we have a lot of people working on Node. We have some sort of Node celebrities. We have Danny Coates who did Node Inspector. We have Daniel Shaw who's done various things with MongoDB and just well-known in the community. We're looking to recruit more, you know, more people to work on Node, be they Node celebrities or not. But yeah, we've got some people working on iOS and some people working on Android and you know, we're always looking for more. Cool. Well, let's talk about Node. We're at the Node Summit. You guys have a lot of challenges. We were talking last night with David Floyer, our chief IO researcher at wikibon.org and we were talking about IO and it's a challenge. And we were talking about latency and it's a constant chase, the latency problem. So before we get into the latency deep conversation, let's talk about the challenges with your application and then where Node really came in to help you. I mean, because you were talking about the old ways of doing things. You know, you nail something down, a process and you have it and then you kind of don't fix it. So talk about some of the latency issues around and what Node does for you. Yeah, so we have kind of a, we have a funny sort of architecture in that we're trying to be as low latency as possible. Like we're trying to be absolutely live as you know, absolutely as fast as we can get data through our system. We want to do that. But we also need to make a copy of it in case you want to come in later if you have another device or you're offline at the time or whatever. And so that has been basically like the big win with Node is that we can shuffle data through our system incredibly quickly. We can hold open lots and lots of connections. Either be they very short lived, very low latency connections or we can keep much longer lived ones open to a database or processes writing to disk drives somehow. Being able to hold open all of those connections and has been crucial to us being able to kind of scale this up and keep delivering low latency that we need to do. So it's been a big win. Klan, what's your take on this? I mean, I see you were following Node, you've been following these guys. What's your take on all this? Well, actually I would rather answer that with another question. But I wonder what role has Node and the rest of your stack because there's other interesting things in the stack besides Node. How has that helped you scale? Because you've been growing so fast and I can't help but think that some of your success has been your own scalability. If people started downloading the app and it wasn't working, the adoption, I imagine probably wouldn't really be there. But some people have criticized Node as a sort of premature optimization. I'm wondering about you have what seems like a really scalable stack and how has that helped you? So, well, I mean, as you say, if we couldn't have scaled it up, obviously it wouldn't work and then people wouldn't be able to use it. And so we were able to. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people say, oh, Node doesn't scale. Like, you need something that can scale. I mean, it does, like nothing scales by itself. Like you have to do some work. I mean, even if the work is setting up your web app behind a load balancer, I mean, it doesn't nothing scales by itself. And so the work that we put into our application logic made it so that it scales with Node. The real reason, like to the first part of your question is like the thing that wins for us is HTTP. Like using HTTP for everything. And Node in HTTP, in Node, HTTP is a first class citizen and it's effortless to do HTTP and it's effortless to do JSON. And so that's what we use as a protocol and that's worked out really well. And because Node does so well at this, we are able to build up several kind of service tiers, you know, several layers of our application staff on the back end that all talk to each other with JSON over HTTP. And likewise with RIOC, that has been a big win because we can talk to RIOC with HTTP and Node does that really, really well. And that's been a big reason that we were able to scale this up. We're good. So what's next for you guys now? Give us a status of the company. Where are you guys at in terms of employees, funding, and all that good stuff. So we're in the process of raising some more money. We obviously know that we have a lot more users. It's a lot more expensive. So we are trying to- And you're hosting all your own stuff. You're not in the cloud? Or are you on Amazon? In the cloud. I mean, yeah. What does that mean? Exactly. You're not using Amazon, are you? We're not using Amazon. We started using Amazon because you're supposed to. And we could not get the latency numbers that we needed. It was too unpredictable and too crazy. And so we went to SoftLayer and we got bare metal machines there. And that was fine. It was really good value for your money, for our money. But the problem was, at the end of the day, Linux, we have these weird IO mysteries, these weird latency mysteries and we couldn't figure out what they were. So we are actually moving our whole deal to joint right now. And so we've already, in the parts of our operation that are on joint, we've already been able to find some just crazy, crazy, just impossible performance problems that we were able to kind of suss out with the magic of detrace. Cool. So in terms of funding, have you taken funding so far? Self-funded? It has been self-funded. So you're looking for round of financing? Yeah, yeah. We're in the process right now. And sure you're going to get a lot of term sheets. I'd definitely invest in you guys. I really love what you guys are doing. I think it's exciting. I think you're pushing the envelope. And I think the app is just dead simple, great. So, and I think it's got a lot of head room. Possibly video, maybe. Oh yeah, video, absolutely. I mean, the infrastructure supports video. We just haven't put it into the clients yet. Great. So I mean, what else is coming soon is like browser client. Like there'll be a browser version of Voxer. It's going to be awesome. And it will sort of sync up with all of your content. And kind of like Gmail. Like you can get your stuff from any computer that has a web browser. It works the same with our mobile phones. It's just usually mobile phones more personal. You don't usually share your mobile phone. But you can have multiple devices and it all syncs already. And so we're going to add a browser version and probably some kind of a follower model. So right now we're symmetric like Facebook. What about like integration with Skype or something like that? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I mean, the thing that Skype does is they do really good phone calls over IP networks. And our thing isn't really phone calls. It's kind of somewhere in between like phone calls and text messaging. And maybe something. I mean, Skype has really good audio. I just think about it because I live in Skype a lot for. Me too, honestly. So I was just thinking it might be nice to be able to get my Voxer messages in Skype. So not calls, but just get the notifications and be able to play them right in Skype. Yeah, I mean, so soon we'll probably also, I mean, I'm not sure when it's going to happen in the long-term vision, but we want to expose an API. And so then maybe we would do that. Maybe somebody will mash up Skype and Voxer and get you what you're looking for there. But yeah, I hope to open up an API so that people can build all kinds of interesting voice apps using our backend. What are you guys thinking in terms of infrastructure side of it in terms of we talked to the CEO of Blacko and Rich Screnta, and they told me that everything's in SSD for them. They're running a pretty cool search engine and they're really doing a great job over there. Are you looking at the Flash, and is your architect, do you have any purpose-built kind of hardware? Are you going to go off the shelf and get like HP Dell boxes or that kind of thing? So right now, we use what, I don't even really know what kind of computer's there. Come out of your gear. Yeah, I mean, we ask our hosting provider to give us computers, and then they do. But no special architecture in terms of IO on the hardware side. We have, I mean, some, one of our React clusters is on SSDs, and another one is on a big spinning disk arrays. Like, because we don't ever throw away messages. We let you keep your messages forever, and so that's a lot of storage. It doesn't quite make sense to keep all that on SSD. So those are an ever-growing collection of disk arrays. You guys are a good prospect for the EMCs of the world out there. HP EMC, so great. Except maybe not because we're using React to scale out our storage. We're not using a big sand. We're just using individual computers to add more storage. We just get on the computer with more storage and React spreads it out. Yeah, cool. Well, Matt, congratulations on the great AppVoxer. Go to the App Store, download it, check it out. I'm sure it's going to be a big hit with everyone from kids up to adults, travelers, and... But no further. No, the whole world. I mean, it's a global web, right? I mean, you add in social capabilities like following. You can really create, I mean, GroupMe's been a great app with the look at the shared text messaging. It's just a matter of time before voice becomes that. I mean, come back and voicemail again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, cool, thanks. Thanks so much. We're here inside theCUBE with Matt, the co-founder, founder or co-founder? Co-founder of Voxer. Check it out, voxer.com, and check out the app. It's growing faster than Facebook and Twitter. In terms of the iStore, I made that up. Implied that from the conversation. I think you could actually conclude that, but the algorithm is secret for the App Store rankings. We'll dig into it. We'll be following that. We'll do some investigative reporting. Congratulations, thanks so much. I will watch that. I'll watch that. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. Hey, Matt Rainey with Voxer, with Clint Finley, and we'll be right back in five minutes with more interviews.