Addresscloud: how we built a business on FOSS
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Forcing (mathematics)Service (economics)SoftwareOpen sourceAddress spaceClosed setDiagramLecture/Conference
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Open sourceDenial-of-service attackService (economics)Closed setProcess (computing)Type theoryDiagram
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Type theoryType theoryTheoryComputer animation
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Information technology consultingInformation technology consultingFormal languageCartesian coordinate systemOpen sourceUniverse (mathematics)Projective planeMultiplication signBit rate19 (number)Computer animation
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Point (geometry)Multiplication signGeometryProcess (computing)Computer animation
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Software developerPerspective (visual)Online helpINTEGRALInformation technology consultingPay television
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SoftwareGeometryCuboidBlack boxComputer animation
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Black boxAxiom of choiceGeometrySoftwarePlastikkarteCASE <Informatik>Storage area networkBoss CorporationMultiplication signTerm (mathematics)Computer animation
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Self-organizationCASE <Informatik>Term (mathematics)Meeting/Interview
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Covering spaceSelf-organizationWebsiteComputing platformMereologyDependent and independent variablesConnectivity (graph theory)Video gameEnterprise architectureMultiplication signCore dumpData managementComplete metric spaceProcess (computing)Hand fanComputer animation
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Boss CorporationMultiplication signProcess (computing)Universe (mathematics)Forcing (mathematics)Video gamePresentation of a groupRoboticsComputer animation
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RoboticsPresentation of a groupVideo gameForcing (mathematics)LaptopCohen's kappaComputer animation
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Projective planeTransformation (genetics)Multiplication signProcess (computing)Cycle (graph theory)Meeting/InterviewComputer animation
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Scale (map)PrototypeProcess (computing)Process (computing)Address spaceInsertion lossComputing platformPlanningWave packetMultiplication signDesign by contractPoint (geometry)Boss CorporationCoordinate systemPrototypeProduct (business)SoftwareBitOrder (biology)Internet service providerSelf-organizationPresentation of a groupService (economics)Software testingArithmetic meanMeeting/InterviewComputer animation
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Address spaceChaos (cosmogony)Goodness of fitCore dumpElectric generatorBit rateRight angleSoftwareCrash (computing)Computer animation
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Vector spaceAddress spaceDenial-of-service attackVector spaceTesselationComputing platformMappingCycle (graph theory)Multiplication signPresentation of a groupDesign by contractProjective planeMereologyVideo gameProduct (business)Service (economics)Point (geometry)1 (number)Sound effectTowerAreaXMLComputer animation
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Server (computing)Vector spacePlanningTesselationFreeware1 (number)Vector spaceMultiplication signAreaLevel (video gaming)CuboidComputer animation
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Point cloudTrailQuery languageVirtual machineReal numberPixelFamilyBoundary value problemLine (geometry)Point cloudTerm (mathematics)GeometryMultiplication signXMLComputer animation
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Pivot elementBitTendonPresentation of a groupGoodness of fitOpen sourceFitness functionService (economics)Forcing (mathematics)Computing platformUniform resource locatorPivot elementPerturbation theoryCodeMappingComputer animation
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Multiplication signDoubling the cubeSelf-organizationEvent horizonCategory of beingDenial-of-service attackTerm (mathematics)Decision theoryForcing (mathematics)Reading (process)Address spaceProcess (computing)TrailComa BerenicesCodeMoment (mathematics)Uniform resource locatorState of matterAreaClosed setDemosceneInternet service providerService (economics)Open sourceLevel (video gaming)HypercubeCycle (graph theory)Logistic distributionDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:08
Okay, it's half past five, so this is the last talk of today. It's me standing between you and beer, so hopefully I can keep you all engaged.
00:22
So I've given technical talks in the past, this is my sick phosphor G. This year I'm actually not, this is a completely non-technical talk, hoping that there'll be some people out there who have got ideas and things that they want to pursue, and you're maybe not sure if you should do it or not, and hopefully this is going to motivate you to do it, that's my intention anyway.
00:41
So I'm Mark Volley, I'm the founder and CEO of AddressCloud. We provide software services to the insurance industry, predominantly in the UK and Ireland, but we've got users around the world, we've got about 400 users in the US as well, using our services for essentially insuring complicated risks, so things like wildfire risk, flood risk,
01:02
and yet we are a, we're not an open source company, we are a closed source company, but we're built on open source technology, but we do give back as much as we can, and we're going to continue to do so. So I've got a quick theory which I'd like to test out, I think there's two types of people at phosphor G.
01:20
I think there are geographers who've fallen into IT, and I think there's IT people who've fallen into geography, so who would classify themselves as a geographer that has fallen into IT? Okay, great. And the IT guys who've become geographers? Yep, okay, me included.
01:40
So, you're both, okay, great. So, yeah, I mean, for me, I did geography at school, I hated it, I shouldn't tell that to the customers, but the only thing I can remember from five years of geography is this. Any guesses why? But now I run an open source, I run a company, a geospatial company based on open source technology,
02:03
so how did that happen? Well, I started my career in 2000. Coming out of university, I got picked up by a big consultancy. We weren't really doing much cutting edge stuff, so my first project was developing an application in COBOL, which, if anyone knows, that was a language written in 1959.
02:23
This was in the 2000s, so not very kind of innovative. But then a requirement came up from the customer to be able to start taking into account geography, and this time in the insurance industry, people were doing geo, you're using GIS, but it was always after sale, so it was always,
02:42
we've insured all these houses, okay, are we screwed or not? And what it was doing was taking that and making that in the point of sale process, and I got involved in that, and I became the geo guy, essentially, in my company, helping insurers out with all these kind of things that they worry about. So there's a lot of geography in insurance.
03:01
I always thought insurance was kind of dry, boring industry. It's actually super interesting, particularly from a GIS perspective. So they're gambling their money, they're gambling our premiums, essentially, against geographic risk. So being able to deliver that insight to them is super useful. So, yeah, but for me, geo was kind of,
03:21
I was, as a consultant, as an advisor, I wasn't really getting into the, my background in the past was in software development, but in that particular role, I was a pure business consultant, helping with integration, and I didn't really know what was happening under the box. It was a black box solution for us. It was not something that we really got to touch.
03:42
So, but I spent about 10 years, I kind of carved out quite a good niche there, going in and working with insurance companies and advising them around technology choices and ways of replatforming and essentially transforming their business using geo, but all the time without really being, getting into the nitty-gritty of the software.
04:02
And then, yeah, one of my bosses in 2011, we were working with a large vendor who were based in California. We got sent out to a conference in San Diego that one or two of you might have heard of, and I thought it was awesome. You know, I went along, I saw some incredible stuff. I really, in terms of the use case and the technology, I know this particular organization
04:23
get quite a lot of stick here. But, you know, they do great tech and they do have some awesome user experiences and use cases are fantastic. So, yeah, completely blown away. And I came back and I was so excited. I was a complete fanboy. You know, I'd been, you know, I'd had the kind of, the white light flashed at me
04:41
and I was like, wow, this stuff is awesome. We need to do everything that I've just seen. But this is the kind of response that we got back. So both from within all the organization and talking to our account manager. It's like, no, are you that thing we showed you? It looks really cool, yeah, but no, it doesn't actually work yet. Okay, great.
05:01
Yeah, you guys are a huge, you got enterprise, we had an enterprise license agreement, but this particular gadget was an acquisition and it wasn't a core part of the platform, so it wasn't included. So it was gonna cost us a bunch of money. And, well, it also depends on this other kind of third party component and you need this and we haven't got it and it's too expensive.
05:22
So pretty disappointing, you know. Really, I was a fanboy. That whole kind of process of being sent there was a complete waste of time. Anyway, fast forward on two years and, yeah, we saw this thing called Phospho-G that came to the UK and it was in Nottingham and it wasn't too far and I kind of looked at it. It was gonna cost a couple of hundred pounds to go
05:42
and I got approval to go. I had to sleep in university halls of residence, which was quite interesting. Been 15 years, I think, since I'd been to uni. But I went and it was great. It was Phospho-G. Anyone went to Phospho-G in Nottingham? Yeah, Graham at the back. Anyone here who's their first Phospho-G?
06:01
Okay, fantastic, welcome. So this was my first Phospho-G and it was great. The presentations, they were people like me. They weren't these kind of robots who'd been rehearsing their presentation to within an inch of its life. They were normal people and talking about stuff that I could relate to. And there wasn't much whooping.
06:21
If anyone's been to San Diego, there's a lot of, whoo, yeah, and there was none of that, thankfully. And, yeah, thank you, Max. And the great thing was, not only, I didn't have to wait until the end of the presentation. I could be sitting there as someone was presenting something cool and download it and there it is. It was working on my laptop, which was so,
06:42
it was incredible. I came away with a complete Phospho-G advocate. So, yeah, pretty happy. And anyway, so I kind of went back to my day job and we were working at the time on a huge transformation project for this insurance company. It was a four-year piece of work and Katie was one of my users.
07:02
I said, Katie, look, we've done it, what do you think? And it was pretty disappointing. So don't ask the users what they think, bad idea. But I wanted to drill into it and I was like, okay, we've spent all this money, we've spent millions, we've spent four years building this thing, what don't you like about it? Well, after that.
07:22
And it turned out that the thing that, she was happy with the overall platform, but the thing that was letting it down was the UK geocoding. So, you know, we thought pretty straightforward, turning addresses into coordinates. But unfortunately, the software that we were using, we just upgraded that as well and it just really wasn't cutting the mustard, it wasn't doing the job.
07:41
And it was for the reasons there, really. So my brain started thinking, okay, can I do this? Can I do something better? Can I, you know, there's a lot of, there must be solutions out there, but can I build something better? So I did. At this time, I was traveling a lot. I was on buses and trains and planes a lot.
08:01
I had some free time and I was, so I sat there and I built a prototype. I demoed it to my boss and my boss said, okay, that's awesome, it's streets ahead of way of any of the competition, but you're one guy on your own, you know? So, you know, we can't work with you and also, you're an employee. You can't, we can't take something that you've built in your spare time
08:21
and get rid of this huge vendor. So I quit. I partnered with another company. So, you know, if you're looking, if you have an idea for a product that you build and you want to sell that to a huge organization, don't be scared. What's a good way to do it often is to try and find another small company
08:40
who are already supplying services, who are already an approved solutions provider. So this company, I showed them what I'd done. They said, yeah, that's great. Warren, he's not here today, but he's at the conference. And together, we put together a proposal. And ultimately, we went and competed against some of the biggest names in the industry.
09:02
There were five companies competing. We went through a year of procurement and very rigorous testing, and we won it. So we won a three-year contract with a huge FTSE 100 company. And so AddressCloud was born, and that's really how we started and how we started the business.
09:21
Now, and I've been to FOSPG ever since. So every FOSPG I go to, I always get something out of it. I mean, sometimes I'm just kind of sitting there a bit hungover in a presentation. Somebody will say something that may be nothing to do with what I was thinking I was gonna get, but I always get something out of it. So I thought I'd just do a quick run-through
09:40
of my FOSPGs and what my takeaways were. So FOSPGs sold in 2015 at this point. I was unemployed, so it was quite a, it was before we were awarded the contracts. Paid my own money, got the plane out to Seoul, and was super glad that I did. I arrived, and the first thing I did was
10:01
I took a workshop with Paul Ramsey and learnt PostGIS, which we use at the core of everything we do. It's where all our data comes from. So that was incredible, to be in a room with the guy who basically created the software teaching you, and for like, what, 100 bucks or whatever. You know, that's just incredible.
10:22
So well worth doing. Yeah, I was in a drone workshop. So when I was in Korea, we did a drone workshop. The Koreans were so worried that we were gonna take our crappy drones and send them to the North Korea, that they sent us a military attaché. Really serious dude with a hat and then another young guy with a clipboard.
10:40
And we kind of saw them starting very, very nervous, but after a while, we just kept on, we just couldn't get this thing off the ground. Just kept on crashing. So that was quite amusing. We didn't start World War III, luckily. And I guess the biggest takeaway, well generally, because he's six foot three, is this chap here, who I met in the drone workshop,
11:02
who's now my partner and AddressCloud CTO. We met at Phosphogee in 2015. So Phosphogee Bonn, following year, a few of you guys know, you went there. I run a workshop there on Elasticsearch, and which, I'd kind of been up all night
11:20
before sweating over, and I think it went down okay. I still get some questions about it, which is good. Yeah, I presented, so I did a presentation in the most intimidating room I've ever presented in my whole life, and got to sit on helmets, especially reinforced very large chair. It was quite good fun. I learned that's where we come across vector tiles,
11:42
so that was the first time I really heard about and was aware of what a vector tile was, which again, now in our products, they are a key part of our product, is vector tiles. And yeah, I got a contracting gig working at MIT, so that was pretty cool. Again, at the time, we'd signed our first customer,
12:01
but actually the first challenge, the challenge, some people say, oh, once you've got your first customer, that's great, you'll be made, but it doesn't necessarily work like that, particularly with the insurance industry where sales cycles are very long. So I found myself with one big customer, but of bills to pay, so this was awesome. So I went to work and helped Tom out at MIT,
12:22
did a two-month project working on Indonesian flood mapping and re-architecting their flood mapping platform. So that was great fun and strengthened my relationship with Tom. So I was working for Tom at the time and now Tom's working with me, so things have changed. Went to Boston in 2017, again, another great conference,
12:43
and I gave a talk on serverless. I thought, great, we're doing this thing called serverless. No one's gonna have known about this. And there were like 20 talks on serverless, but it was still, it was good practice, and great to really understand. And I think the fact that if it's just you doing it, then maybe it's something that could be interesting,
13:02
but everyone's doing it, it's indeed a thing, and it is the future. Yeah, got to go and see MIT. So I think for me, Phosphogy is as much about what you learn in the workshops as your kind of down time as well and new experiences. And yeah, I got to go and visit MIT and live out my Matt Damon fantasy.
13:23
And then also, we were sitting in, towards the end of the conference, sitting in a workshop, and it was a T-Rex workshop, I think it was. We looked at understanding how vector tiles were served and actually got a light bulb thinking, well, we can do this ourself. We, at the time, we were using Mapbox, and Mapbox were great, but their commercials weren't really working for us.
13:42
They had a kind of minimum plan for any commercial use, which was, as a small company, it was hugely expensive for us. They now no longer have that, but we came more out, and we realized that we could do it for free. And then finally, Phosphogy last year. Every year, I get to the end of Phosphogy, and they announce it next year, and if it's somewhere that's really far away,
14:01
I think, oh, there's no way I'm gonna go there. And then a couple of months later, I'm looking at flights, and then I book. But I actually took the whole family last year with me, and we did a camping trip in the Serengeti, which was awesome. If you go camping in the Serengeti, though, just be aware that the campsites don't have any boundaries or any fences. So those lines that you go and see,
14:21
they're just outside, just like you and a piece of canvas in between. But thankfully, I still have two children. And I convinced Tom to come and work with me. So Tom started working with me last year, so it's coming up to a year's anniversary of us working full-time together, and it's been fantastic.
14:42
And Tom learned what a cloud-optimized geotiff is, and I won't pretend to explain that I understand it, but if you want to go tomorrow at half past two, Tom's gonna tell you why they're awesome. So I guess to conclude in terms of a takeaway, really, when I started and I used to work,
15:02
before I ran the company, I used to look at and evaluate proposals from companies like me. And at the time, open source, you'd get laughed out of a boardroom with open source. That's no longer the case. People are looking, the customers, they've gone through the whole pattern. And going back to Jody's talk earlier, the procurement people are becoming more and more smart,
15:22
and they understand what this is. Don't be afraid to challenge an established market. So if you're a small company and you're going against big companies, Vincent mentioned that he does, we certainly do. We find ourselves at the moment in some very huge procurement processes where we're a two-and-a-half man company,
15:42
and the next smallest has probably got 250 people. But we're winning. This thing's happening. I don't know if people saw very hot off the press like two days ago, Pitney Bowes sold their software business. So any MapInfo users?
16:00
There's probably only one left. But they sold the business, and Stephen Feldman, who can't be here this year, put an interesting tweet that he saw MapInfo. He was previously the UK or European managing director, that he'd basically seen them being squeezed out by simple cloud-based alternatives.
16:21
That's us. That's companies like us and Vincent's company. We're out there, and we're really making a difference. Thank you. So I guess to conclude, if you've got a good idea, and you've got a good market fit, I think that's probably the key thing,
16:41
is having good market fit, then persist and you will prevail. Don't be afraid to pivot. So we started as a geocoder. We're still a geocoder at heart, but we've added in data enrichment, data pre-fill services, location intelligence, and we've built our own mapping platform. So follow the money. Follow what your customers want,
17:01
because if your customers want it, there'll be other customers who want it as well. And yeah, attend and support Phosphogee. It's a fantastic community. We try and kind of open source bits of what we can. We both give presentations every year, and I'm pleased to say we're sponsoring Phosphogee UK in Edinburgh this year.
17:21
So anyone who's UK or can get to Edinburgh, it's a fantastic city. It's always a great conference, so come along and we'll see you there. That's everything from me. Thank you very much for your time, and I'm happy to take any questions,
17:43
if everyone's thirsty and they're thinking about beer. Okay, yep. It's end of September. We haven't got it on there. I think it's the, anyone know what Phosphogee UK is? I think it's the last,
18:00
I think it's the third week in September. Yeah, but it's a different, it's a very different event, Phosphogee UK, but it's obviously a lot smaller and kind of quite UK focused, but it's very well worth attending. It's a good event. Oh, 19th to 20th, thank you, Jodie. Yes?
18:25
We've got, so our biggest customer, they're still our biggest customer in terms of the size of their organization, but our biggest customer by billing now is another insurance company, so it's doing really well. We've doubled year on year for the last, we've doubled revenues year on year for the last three years,
18:41
and yeah, we've got quite a nice portfolio. We've got two large insurance customers, a few smaller insurers. We've got like some pet insurance company in Ireland who are using us, you know, and we've also diversified from just insurance to logistics and some small organizations as well, but at the moment, as I say,
19:01
the sales cycles are very long, so we're in RFP processes with probably three or four global insurers, like huge, huge companies. Who knows? Maybe we get it, or maybe we don't. If we get it, then next year we'll be hiring, so yeah. So we provide geocoding,
19:20
so we provide a geocoding service. We provide a location intelligence service, so we'll basically give, essentially if you're buying insurance, you put in your address. Behind the scenes, the insurer calls us, and we tell them where the address is, and we tell them everything we know about it. So we'll tell them the flood risk, the subsidence risk, how many bedrooms it has,
19:42
how many bathrooms, what it's made of, what's the roof made of for that particular property. So they can then make a decision as to whether they want to write it, and if so, how much. And it helps them differentiate between competitors who may be just doing the same thing, but at a postal code level. So it's really giving kind of hyper accurate risk assessments.
20:09
All kinds. It's predominantly commercial closed source data, so we work with third party data providers in the UK or globally. And we also take open data,
20:21
and we cleanse it, enrich it, and combine it ourselves. So in the past, we've always kind of, our approach has been kind of data agnostic. We'll tell you where the property is, and we'll tell you all of these different opinions about that property, but we're in the process at the moment of kind of curating our data and saying, well, it's in a flood area, it's in a bad flood area,
20:41
but we know from this other data source, for example, that it's an apartment on the top floor. So actually, your competitors won't write it because they're taking a two dimensional look. But we can tell you it's on the top floor, so go ahead and write it. The flood water's not going to get that high. So we're starting to do that kind of work as well. Any other questions?
21:02
No? Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for listening to me, and enjoy your evening.