The Heroku Killer That Got Them Into YC
š Show Notes In this episode of complexity.fm, Bas Steins and Michal Martinka sit down with Brandon Bayer, founder of Flightcontrol and creator of Blitz.js, to talk about the messy reality of deploying to AWS without a DevOps team. Brandon walks through why he built Flightcontrol as a Heroku alternative that deploys directly into your own AWS account, why the product ended up being "too limiting" after years of growth, and why he and his co-founder decided to rebuild everything from scratch with a new product called Ravion. The conversation dives deep into platform engineering, Terraform vs OpenTofu, the "DevOps is a mindset, not a role" debate, and how AI agents are reshaping the relationship between developers, DevOps engineers, and infrastructure itself. Brandon also shares the wild story of applying to YC as a "Hail Mary" with zero expectations, getting accepted the same day, and raising a million dollars within a week. ā±ļø Topics Covered 00:00 Introduction to Brandon Bayer and Flightcontrol 01:56 What Flightcontrol does and why it deploys into your own AWS account 02:30 The Heroku free tier shutdown and its (non) impact on Flightcontrol 05:16 Flightcontrol's target customer: teams without a dedicated DevOps engineer 07:11 The typical company journey from PaaS to AWS to platform engineering 09:09 Tech stack behind Flightcontrol and the pain of Next.js app router 10:48 Forking Next.js and building a Rails-like framework, Blitz.js 11:00 Flightcontrol's YC journey: fundraising struggles before acceptance 12:12 The YC interview process and mock interviews with Stripe Atlas 15:34 Getting the YC acceptance call and raising 1 million dollars in a week 18:52 Being in YC's last fully remote COVID batch 19:16 Getting first customers through Twitter and organic growth 24:14 Realizing Flightcontrol was "too limiting" after years of growth 25:16 Introducing Ravion: rebuilding the product from scratch 28:52 How Ravion uses Terraform instead of custom orchestration 30:52 Terraform vs OpenTofu and the licensing drama 35:49 Bringing your own Terraform and custom modules in Ravion 41:14 Cost visibility, logs, and metrics in one unified UI 44:37 Language and cloud agnosticism, RailPack, and Docker generation 48:41 Is DevOps a mindset, not a role? Shift-left and self-service 50:02 AI agents, guardrails, and sandboxed preview environments 55:59 Comparing Ravion to Crossplane and other IDP tools 59:19 Why deterministic infrastructure still matters in the AI agent era 1:03:53 How AI is changing team dynamics between developers and DevOps 1:09:10 Why small teams may be disrupting big companies faster thanks to AI š Resources & Links Flightcontrol: https://www.flightcontrol.dev Flightcontrol Docs: https://www.flightcontrol.dev/docs Ravion Docs: https://docs.ravion.com Blitz.js: https://blitzjs.com Brandon Bayer on X: https://x.com/flybayer Brandon Bayer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbayer1 Flightcontrol on GitHub: https://github.com/flightcontrolhq Flightcontrol on Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flightcontrol
