Drifting in Space - Cohort #2 - Workers Launchpad Demo Day

Hi, I'm Paul and I'm a co-founder of Drifting and SpaceCorp. Web browsers have become the de facto operating system for new application software, but most web infrastructure is still optimized for blogs and e-commerce sites. They're not built for the sort of full-fledged desktop class applications that many developers are now trying to ship over the web. As a result, companies that ship modern applications have either had to invest a ton on infrastructure projects outside their core competency or else ship janky and sluggish apps. At Drifting and Space, we've studied the architecture of applications like Figma and Codespaces. We've generalized a key piece of their infrastructure into an open-source product called Plane and productized it as a managed offering called Jamsocket. They're used in production today by companies building ambitious applications. We're also building DriftDB, an open-source and embeddable data layer for synchronizing state within an application. Our goal across our offerings is to create a platform where the problem of managing state between the client, servers, and persistent storage is abstracted away, so that developers only have to interact with one in-memory representation of their program data. Desktop virtualization is a double-digit billion-dollar industry, and it's being eaten by browser-based software. We're building the tools to make it possible to ship desktop class software to the browser without compromising on features or performance. We sell our managed offering directly to application developers, SaaS companies, and companies building internal applications. Before Drifting and Space, I worked at Google and as a hedge fund quant, and my co-founder Taylor worked on data-intensive tools at Uber and Datadog. We've both felt the limitations of trying to use a traditional web stack for computationally-intensive problems. We're alumni of the Winter 22 iCombinator batch. We're now a team of four engineers based in New York and San Francisco. The shift into the browser is the largest inflection point to happen to application software in decades, and AI looks poised to be another major inflection point on top of that. Application software is no longer an .exe file on your desktop. It's a distributed system with states split across clients, servers, GPUs, and databases. The industry needs a fundamental evolution in the way we build and deploy software, and we're excited to be building it. Thank you. Thank you.