
Can you build a startup on .Net? - rudyl
http://rlacovara.blogspot.com/2012/03/should-you-use-net-for-your-statup.html
======
kogir
Yes, you can certainly build a startup on .Net[1]. That said, there are some
things you should consider carefully before you do:

* Will you be able to recruit top talent? In Seattle, not likely a problem. In the Bay Area, it's harder[2].

* Does the licensing cost make sense for your business? BizSpark is awesome, but it's not forever. In most cases the answer is yes, but not always[3].

* Are you willing to learn Linux too? You're going to run across something cool you want to use that only works on Linux, or works best on Linux. Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, etc. come to mind.

I've built a startup on .Net before, and may do it again. The documentation
for the whole Windows/.Net/SQL Server stack is amazing, and they're _very_
predictable. With little effort you can learn enough to know how they'll
perform, where they'll fall down next, and the next steps to move forward[4].

[1] I co-founded and was CTO of Loopt. We may have had product problems, but
the tech never held us back.

[2] It's _hard_ to find really good people willing to work on .Net in The
Valley. They know their next gig will likely be at another startup, Facebook,
or Google - .Net won't likely help you there.

[3] After BizSpark is over, look into SPLA licensing. It allows you to pay
monthly for only what you use, and allows you to always be running the latest
version. During all of Loopt Microsoft Licensing never cost more per month
than an engineer, and the software saved us at least as much time and money.
Remember, each time "The New Hotness" breaks, the time you spend debugging or
migrating to something else is time you're not spending on your product.

[4] For example, Windows and SQL Server have great performance reporting.
You'll know you need to get more RAM in a month, or switch to SSDs soon, long
before you actually have problems.

~~~
chaostheory
My only concern about working with .NET has nothing to do with the language or
the underlying tech. They're both fine. The problem is that the open source
community on .NET (both C#, ASP.NET, & VB.NET) is anemic compared to virtually
every other language, and I'd rather not reinvent wheels whenever possible.

I know one way around this is use java open source, by either a source or
bytecode translator from Java to C#. Is there anything good to know in terms
of limitations of this approach? Are there alternatives?

There's also the problem of using stuff that's targeted primarily for Mono,
instead of .NET proper, and vice versa.

That being said a good carpenter can still crank out a nice table with a rock
and some wood, but the question is should he?

~~~
kogir
I've found that when it doesn't make sense to keep everything in .Net, it's
great to break things out into independent services. If there's something
awesome you want to use in Java, like Lucene, expose it as a service and
consume it from .Net.

In fact, if you do this right, you end up with a bunch of clearly separated
re-usable services like in AWS. It also helps prevent the "giant ball of
spaghetti" architecture by making it impossible.

~~~
jbigelow76
I know it was just a "for instance" but there is a .NET implementation of
Lucene, open source and everything. <http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/>

The point being, "no open source community", "license costs" (see bizspark),
the "MS is a desktop stack" are all popular myths that haven't been relevant
for years.

But your point of well defined, independent services is spot on.

~~~
chaostheory
I didn't say "no open source community"; I said super small open source
community compared to almost every major alternative. That isn't a myth. It's
reality. Moreover Java has a lot more big projects that .NET just doesn't
cover. Not to mention we're ignoring the tons of stuff you can find in Ruby,
Python, and even PHP.

------
untog
Of course you can. People spend far, far too much time worrying about what
programming language they should use for their project. You should not spend
your time learning Ruby/node.js/Scala, you should launch your MVP with what
you know.

If you have to, you can change later- though from experience, there's little
need to with .NET. I work for RecordSetter (<http://www.recordsetter.com>) and
we use ASP.NET MVC- back in the early days of the company, the CTO knew .NET
very well, so he just used his existing knowledge. C# is a great language,
Visual Studio is a great IDE, MVC is a great framework. And so on and so on.
We aren't really suffering any ill effects as a result of our choice, and as
others have noted, BizSpark membership is actually a great bonus.

If anyone out there wants to play around with C# for the web but feels like
the ASP.NET stack is too heavy (it can be), take a look at Nancy.FX
(<http://www.nancyfx.org/>). It's super lightweight and allows you to keep
most of .NET out of your way.

~~~
web_chops
I really love NancyFx. It's such a well thought out framework. If there is
some feature missing, all you have to do is hook at the proper place. It
really simplified building our startup (<http://designduke.com>). Best part is
that using a REST framework encourages you to move out most of the logic and
functionality to client and it scales pretty well.

~~~
friism
Have you considered running on AppHarbor instead of raw EC2? Nancy works great
on our platform.

~~~
option_greek
Do you have any link that compares performance of workers to EC2 instance
types (for a raw idea of how much power an existing app needs) ? Also, how
does deployment to IIS server and running multiple custom executables for
various other tasks workout on your platform.. I mean can a worker run
multiple applications ?

~~~
friism
We haven't made any direct comparisons, but AppHarbor web workers are very
fast and can handle upwards of 200 reqeusts/second for cached responses of
moderate size. For non-ASP.NET workloads, we offer background workers:
[http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/03/08/background-workers-
in-b...](http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/03/08/background-workers-in-beta)

------
mwsherman
There are surprisingly few arguments about semicolons in the .Net community.

~~~
Edootjuh
You've never seen a VB.NET vs. C# argument? Call yourself lucky.

~~~
lubos
last one I've seen was at least 5 years ago and even then it wasn't a big deal

------
hkarthik
_Listen to the middle days of the first StackOverflow podcast and you'll hear
that for a long time they ran StackOverflow on a single server. They were
serving a million uniques with the web app and database running on a single
box! It wasn’t even a very big box._

As a former .NET guy, I think the hosting part of deploying .NET wasn't well
addressed by this post.

Jeff Atwood built and colocated a dedicated 2 or 3U server to run Stack
Overflow. I certainly wouldn't call that an easy or recommended thing to do
for a startup, especially if none of the founders have enough hardware and
system administration experience.

Compare this to signing up for EC2, Linode, or Rackspace and spinning up a
Linux instance to run Rails, Django, or Node. Even easier to just spin
something up for free on Heroku. These are mature, solid solutions being used
by many startups today.

There are a few providers like AppHarbor that are trying to make .NET hosting
a bit more startup friendly, but there weren't any mention of those in this
post.

~~~
j45
I'm not primarily a .NET guy (I have done a fair bit though), but why wouldn't
it be possible or reasonable to spin up a VPS instance of Windows if it's a
platform you're totally familiar with (much like someone being familiar with a
linux instance?)

Firing up a linux instance does require more sysadmin skills from the command
line (this can be non programmer skills to some), compared to a gui based OS.

Disclaimer: I use linux myself but have spent enough years in the professional
world to know that there are things that windows can do equally well, just
don't ask it to do everything. A basic startup stack of IIS (included), mysql,
and a framework (download asp.net MVC) doesn't take much setup.

~~~
hkarthik
It's definitely possible to spin up a Windows instance on EC2 and get it
running. Many startups built on .NET do that today.

As for the sysadmin on the software side, I agree most .NET devs that want to
build something probably have those skills. It's the hardware aspect that I
think needed to be addressed.

The OP espoused the easy scalability of .NET using the Stackoverflow example
without mentioning that they colocated with dedicated hardware.

~~~
rudyl
good point. StackOverflow used physical boxes not virtual servers and that
certainly makes scaling a database easier. On the other hand I currently host
HireFlo on a single Rackspace cloudserver. I have 3 web apps, a SQL server
instance, and 2 processors hosted on the same VS and it's working well so far.
I'll definitely move SQL Server off to it's own box at some point though.

------
mindcrime
I'm pretty sure you can build a startup around almost any mature, real-world
tech stack... so, basically, exclude "esoteric" programming languages like
Brainfuck, Intercal, Whitespace, etc. Otherwise, I think you could - if you
chose to - build a startup around RPG/400 on an IBM iSeries, Fortran, COBOL on
MVS on an IBM zSeries, Ada, .Net, Prolog, Pascal, Perl or whatever floats your
boat. It's a question of the tradeoffs and the economics of each decision. Can
you hire programmers? What are the licensing costs? What about the "ilities,"
like scalability, interoperability, reliability, etc?

Maybe for some startups the right decision is .Net, or RPG, or Forth or Rexx
or what-have-you. But I'm guessing for _most_ startups, there are better
choices. I'm also not sure that - even on a per startup basis - there is one
ultimately __right __choice. More likely there are a handful of really good
choices, a pile of so-so choices, and a long-tail of fairly ridiculous
choices.

------
rudyl
Visual Studio, especially when paired with Resharper is a tremendously
productive dev environment. C# is a fantastic language and it's got a host of
new features that make it possible to write in a more functional style, stuff
like lambdas, expressions, type inference, dynamic types, anonymous types.

The main problem is that people don't think about any of that when they think
about .Net. They think about that festering bog of evil and spaghetti code
that is WebForms.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
What are the odds that people actually:

1) use the advanced features and not tripping themselves

2) use it frequently

3) and got a lot of productivity boost out of those features

I would imagine most people will download 3rd-party libraries (open source or
not) and tools to become productive. Not so much on the C# advanced features.

~~~
web_chops
Actually, the new features introduced in C# increases developer productivity
quite a bit. More importantly they increase the readability of code by cutting
down on the repetitive stuff. Once some one uses LINQ, lambdas and dynamics
its hard to go back.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
Can you explain how they can cut down lots of repetitive stuff?

Not to knock you down but my experience with Java is that libraries typically
help a lot as opposed to syntax.

~~~
mquander
Go look at any documentation or discussion of any non-Java language, and see
their examples of using their sequence abstractions, or generators (yield), or
first-class functions. Those are not ideas which are unique to C#.

If you just want to see a piece of code in C# that would have to be written
totally differently in Java to be readable (unless you use some quite abstract
third-party libraries like Guava to help) I picked one of my Stack Overflow
answers at random: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2966592/how-to-
refactor-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2966592/how-to-refactor-
this-duplicated-linq-code/2966726#2966726)

~~~
edwinnathaniel
That example is definitely looks great.

... and yes, as a Java developer, I use Guava once in a while and I do
JavaScript as part of my job as well and I do appreciate first-class function.

Typically the problems that functional features solve are filtering and
transformation and yet most often than not I happen to solve them at the SQL
layer (be it JPQL or straight up SQL).

~~~
macca321
Once you start thinking of your object model as data, you can do amazing
things. Want to find all the types in your system that implement an interface
and spin them up?

    
    
         var rules = 
    		AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies
    		.SelectMany(a => a.GetTypes())
       		.Where(t => typeof(ISecurityRule).IsAssignableFrom(t))
       		.Select(t => Activator.CreateInstance() as ISecurityRule)
       		.OrderBy(r => r.Priority);
    

You can then run a chain of responsibility by writing

    
    
        var allowed = rules.First(r => r.Check(someObject) != null);  
        //Check returns null when a rule isn't relevant to the object being checked
    

it's pretty sweet for metaprogramming when you can run queries against your
codebase

~~~
edwinnathaniel
That is definitely sweet.

Java has AOP and extensively use Annotations (Attributes in .NET) and the
approach there is definitely heavier than what you wrote above.

------
j45
You can absolutely build a startup in any language that has a capable
framework for the web.

As mentioned in the article, StackOverflow is one prominent .net startup that
comes to mind.

Generally, customers don't care what you code in. It might matter if your
customers are developers, but even then, there's API's.

How well you code in your tool of choice may be relevant when you hit a
million whatevers you want measure, but by then you'll probably be scaling
anything you built.

The most important thing is to have great momentum and see it through to a
real result. You'll always do that best with the tools you're most familiar
with, with the caveats listed above.

Use decent habits to be friendly to your future self to keep the codebase
reasonably something you want to keep working on. Don't strive for perfection,
it never happens the first time.

Sometimes as developers becoming entrepreneurs we get a little too focused on
making our tooling so great that the attention doesn't always end up on the
user experience and getting rid of their pain-points. Instead we can fall prey
to solving our own pain points and staying in analysis paralysis.

------
fleitz
If you ask this question then the answer is no, however, you probably can't
build a startup in any language as you're too worried about what everyone else
is doing rather than what your customers want.

Seriously think about a young mark zuckerberg making facemash and worrying
whether it could be a $100 billion dollar company if he wrote it in PHP.

If anyone worries about these things just change your server headers so it
looks like you're developing in whatever language they want.

Its usually a good idea to change the headers anyway so that any automated
attacks run the wrong scripts. Change your postfix to Exchange, change your
nginx to IIS and vice versa.

------
dirkdk
speaking technology wise, of course you can use .NET to build a startup
product. C# is a very mature and nice language, Visual Studio is the best IDE
out there, beating Eclipse, XCode and TextMate hands down.

Another issue is in what fields that these languages are used, what type of
developer works there, and what kind of developer you need to hire next month
to scale your products. Java is for banks, very big projects with integration
with lots of legacy systems. .NET is more used inside of companies,
integrating with Sharepoint, MS SQL server. Ruby on Rails is for hip
independent developers that teach themselves and go for productivity. PHP is
for easy web development.

All these fields have different kind of developers that work in it. Figure out
what kind of company you are, and choose technology accordingly.

------
dawie
Plenty of Fish runs on .NET. Marcus says it's more scalable than most of it's
Open Source counterparts...

~~~
robin_reala
Plenty of Fish also store(d?) passwords in plaintext[1]. I wouldn’t
particularly trust their technical decisions.

[http://grumomedia.com/why-plenty-of-fish-stores-passwords-
in...](http://grumomedia.com/why-plenty-of-fish-stores-passwords-in-plain-
text/)

~~~
lubos
didn't everyone store passwords in plaintext at some point of their career?
your argument is pretty weak and didn't invalidate their claims that .NET is
just as good as open source Linux stack when it comes to scalability.

~~~
jurre
>> didn't everyone store passwords in plaintext at some point of their career?

Never have, never will.

------
devinegan
I have a good friend who runs his bootstrapped startup
(<http://www.georiot.com/>) on Mono/Linux (<http://mono-project.com/ASP.NET>).
Utilizing some OSS helps to keep the cost down.

------
rudyl
BTW, Azure is a nice scaling solution but it slows initial development way
down, it's a pain to debug, and it locks you into a single hosting provider.
Not a good solution for me and I think it's crazy that Microsoft keeps pushing
it as a platform for early stage startups.

~~~
friism
Have you considered AppHarbor as a faster-turnaround alternative to Azure?
<https://appharbor.com/>

~~~
gigantor
Just some friendly advice, the excessive self promotion is doing you more harm
than good

~~~
nopassrecover
Yeah I'd been looking at AppHarbor vs Amazon/RackSpace/Ninefold. I think this
excessive value-less self promotion just ruled out one for me.

------
vladpetroff
Just some quick numbers - in 1 week flat I've been able to create a working
prototype for our start-up with the stack mentioned, coding in my spare time
(after work and on the weekend). If you know your stuff you can get up and
running in no time :) Our start-up (collectifly.com) is built exclusively on
the .NET stack, with ASP.NET MVC as frontend and using a bunch of open source
libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, KnockoutJS and a few more. For the
backend I'm currently experimenting with RavenDB not because I don't like SQL
Server but because we're building a social graph, so a NOSQL database seems to
fit better.

~~~
friism
Have you considered hosting on AppHarbor. Deployment as easy and fast, we can
scale and we have a great hosted RavenDB add-on:
<https://appharbor.com/addons/ravenhq>

~~~
reddit_clone
Where is the kill file when you need it?

------
abrudtkuhl
We are a BizSpark startup using a combination of free tools and open source
technology. Haven't spent a dime yet.

------
Khao
I recently discovered about Microsoft's BizSpark program and I must say, I'm
really tempted to try and build up a side project just so I can apply to
BizSpark and have tons of free resources to build my side project. I love .Net
and I think Azure is really good, even if the article says it's too cumbersome
for a small project. I think the fact that developers can forget all about
server configuration and implementation and just start a VM in one click is
nice.

~~~
friism
AppHarbor makes hosting projects of any size much easier than Azure, check it
out: <https://appharbor.com/>

~~~
Khao
This seems really good. I might give it a try in the future. Their "add-on"
services look really cool to use also.

------
lomaxx
We've built our app (<http://keypay.com.au>) on .net and have zero complaints
so far. The best thing is that with AppHarbor, it makes it easy to spend less
time focusing on "the stack" and more time focusing on just getting stuff
done.

We build fast, release often and the .net stack is so mature that we spend
very little time thinking about it and the majority of the time solving
business problems.

------
drcube
"Bizspark is proof that Microsoft loves programmers and startups"

No, it isn't. Not anymore than MS giving away free licenses for Office, VS and
Windows to college students is proof that they love college kids. Not anymore
than giving poor schools in Africa free licenses for Office and Windows means
they love African schoolchildren. And not anymore than the junky giving free
dope samples to kids means that he loves kids.

It's just business.

~~~
jf
Yes, it's just business. I agree that you shouldn't ascribe the emotion of
"love" to Microsoft, or any large corporation. But in the same vein, I don't
think it's fair to equate them with a "junky giving free dope samples to
kids".

~~~
drcube
It may or not be as morally wrong, depending on your view of Microsoft and/or
drug dealers. But the motivations are exactly the same.

This isn't just restaurants in the food court giving free samples to draw in
more customers. They are deliberately building a dependence on their products
and will reap the rewards later.

------
perssontm
Microsoft does the right thing here to give licenses away to startups.
However, I would try to stick to their mainstream products which are likely to
survive a few years ahead and avoid the "to-new-unproven" ones, mainly to make
sure the product is still developed and maintained 3+ years down the line.

I'd go for open source any day, but that brings other challenges instead. :)

------
sakopov
Honestly, 3/4 years ago i would pick another platform because deploying code
in .NET was a complete nightmare. Nowadays things have changed a bit. You have
transforms. You have TeamBuild with TFS, which is very solid, but can still be
a pain in the rear to get stuff going. Changing the build workflow and messing
with MSBuild always seemed odd to me. I'm not even going to mention setting up
and troubleshooting Web Deploy Service which is undocumented disaster. I
personally use GIT and deploy to AppHarbor. The process is amazingly smooth
and the entire experience with AppHarbor folks has been wonderful.

In addition, I would agree with the statement that more knowledgeable and
skilled devs have switched to ASP.NET MVC. There is no doubt in my mind. You
need to have decent understanding of OOP to do pretty much anything in MVC.
Not to say that you can't write bad code. You can, but folks that work in MVC
are typically more serious developers.

------
shade
As someone who's currently an experienced .net developer (based in NE Ohio),
prefers working for smaller companies, and is getting the urge to look around
and see what opportunities are out there, I have a question I'd like
everyone's input on: is staying mostly .net-focused a viable idea, or am I
taking on a serious career risk?

I've worked with python and ruby a bit and am currently working my way through
Programming Clojure, but right now I'm much more experienced with .net and
it's where my comfort zone is. I try to keep abreast of what's happening
elsewhere, but don't have as much time as I'd always like to try other
technologies.

I'm curious what people think - am I better off pushing harder on new stuff
and hitting meetups, or is C#/MVC still a viable option despite Microsoft's
current struggles? (Not that they're on the verge of disappearing or anything,
but they definitely don't have the buzz in their favor right now...)

~~~
noveltyaccount
There are untold corporations whose entire enterprises are powered by .NET and
Windows Server. You'll have an income stream on .NET for the remainder of your
natural life, nothing to worry about. As for the small company bit, maybe.
Small teams within a large company, sure.

------
peppertree
As Rails and Django become more complex, it's making more and more sense to
give .NET and Java stacks a second look.

------
dm8
I used to develop .Net applications and I love that platform. MSDN is awesome
and Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE. I know at least two startups
that participated in BizSpark and they get lots of free goodies from MSFT.

~~~
gte910h
I have used several versions of Visual Studio, and while it's not
Eclipse/slow/broken, I never really saw why everyone loves the hell out of
VS's IDE. Can you show me a page highlighting why it's so good? (Not trolling,
really trying to understand the love).

~~~
edwinnathaniel
Eclipse is awesome for the record. Especially given that it's free.

Most people use VS.NET with Resharper while Eclipse has a few Resharper
features built-in and more.

Eclipse + Maven = great deal.

~~~
falcolas
Eclipse might not have any up-front monetary costs, but it has costs in lost
productivity while waiting on it (which would arguably cost you more than a
closed source license when applied to the value of a developer's time).

It's gotten better, but it still has a ways to go.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
My machine is beefed up so I'm sure someone else's cost using less powerful
machine (Intel P3 or something...) is more than mine. Ditto with VS.NET 2010
or future version of Microsoft IDE when used in older machines.

Shall we count the cost of using plugins as well? Including OS boot time and
such and such?

Sorry, what I mean to say is that I don't know what you're talking about of
this "waiting on it".

------
joeblau
I was at the Node meetup in San Fran and after hearing about the BizSpark
opportunity, I am seriously contemplating building out a startup on
Microsoft's platform.

------
anthonyjs
Yes. As others have mentioned BizSpark is a fantastic resource. As a developer
mostly using the .NET and MS ecosystem it’s enabled me to build using tools
and technologies I am familiar with. I use Amazon EC2 to host the applications
as Azure seems a bit more expensive. If you are experienced in the .NET space
definitely look at Bizspark, even the exit fee isn’t much when you factor in
all the tools you get to use for YEARS.

------
DrJokepu
Anyone thinking about building an .NET (ASP.NET MVC) based web application
should strongly consider a Mono - PostgreSQL - Unix-based OS stack. You get
the power of Unix (not a negligible thing in my opinion), PostgreSQL is simply
awesome (and it's getting better every day) and Mono is really ready for
primetime. Hosting will be cheaper as well. We've been doing this for a while
and so far we had very good experiences.

~~~
jackfoxy
What exactly is the power of Unix vs. say 64-bit Win2008 R2? The file system?
I'll buy that, and that matters if you have a shitload of files. Anything
else?

~~~
DrJokepu
The shell, for instance. It's much easier to get things sorted out in the
command line than on Windows and Remote Desktop is a pain in the back. Once
you're familiar enough with the shell and shell scripting, maintaining Windows
servers can get very frustrating. I know that there's Cygwin and PowerShell on
Windows but in my opinion they really aren't as useful as a native Unix
environment.

Another one is the easily accessible documentation in man pages. I don't think
the Windows documentation and the KB articles are nearly as well organised as
the man pages.

Performance-wise, there really isn't that much difference; the latest versions
of the Windows, Linux, *BSD and Darwin kernels are equally capable in my
experience. In fact, I wouldn't recommend against NTFS as file storage; we use
it to store a very large amount of data on Windows 2008 servers and we are
very happy with it.

~~~
jackfoxy
From what I have seen PowerShell is woefully underused and unmastered by many,
many folks working in the MS stack. Probably because it is so much easier to
use the GUI for everything.

The MSDN site has always sucked, and it's almost always better to Google
searches for MS tech help than search within MSDN or the knowledge base. (I
frequently find the MSDN article I need from Google. In fact there is a MSDN
search widget available for iGoogle!!!) Language and framework docs, help, and
searches from within VS are quite good, and from what I've seen of VS11 beta,
even better. Also SQL server docs are good.

But, yeah searching for OS docs & help is no fun.

------
Athtar
To all those that are doing/have done startups on .NET, do you guys mind doing
a few blog posts on the subject? What was working with .NET like? What worked
for you? What didn't? What's the story when it comes to licensing, hosting,
deployment, scalability, etc.?

I know StackOverflow has a few posts on the topic but I wouldn't mind hearing
from some of the other startups.

------
amalag
There was a post a few months ago about a startup that needed to redo their
entire application in open source because their biz spark ran out. Anyone
remember that? Maybe it's a good deal now, but it better be a good deal a
couple years from now when it expires. Anyway I am just happy I don't have to
do microsoft stuff.

------
jason_slack
I am looking at BizSpark and I cannot tell if it includes Server deployment?
Windows Server 2008, etc? Anyone know?

------
subpixel
FWIW, Seamless.com is .net

~~~
parsnips
But it's a festering pile of maverick.net :(

------
keymone
on productivity of programming languages and environments: the more complex
environment you need for programming language - the less productive that
language actually is.

------
queryly
agree with webform is death statement. MS should remove it from asp.net. it is
drag and drop programming for another age and another generation of
developers.

------
keymone
title goes "can you build?"

article goes "should you build?"

answer to title is yes. answer to article is _depends_.

i would go with Rails simply because it's cheaper no matter how you look at
it.

------
aneisf
Take a look at juggle.com. All .NET.

------
spencerfry
Carbonmade is built on .NET.

------
thatusertwo
I heard one reasons myspace didn't scale was because it was hard to find
people who had experience scaling so large.

