The company said the service, which supports Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, already manages nearly 100,000 cloud resources and processes more than 125 million datapoints daily. Beta customers include Edmodo, Yellowhammer, Exablox, Atomwise and Webkite, according to a press release announcing the beta.

Co-founded by VMware veterans Belcher and Izzy Azeri, Stackdriver got $5 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital and others last August to pursue its plan put eyes on cloud workloads.

Early competitors include Datadog and Boundary but old line network management vendors like IBM Tivoli; BMC and CA Technologies are also in the mix. As more business workloads flow to cloud infrastructure, the need for reliable, real-time tools to monitor performance and flag trouble spots will play a critical role.

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David Mytton, CEO of Server Density (and friends.)

1:  Haste makes waste.  It’s natural to be in a hurry to get product out the door, but take a breath first and really gauge where you are. Slow down when it comes to key decisions, said Dan Belcher, co-founder of Boston-based Stackdriver, a startup focused on monitoring and managing cloud workloads. “Doing things too early is as dangerous as — or even worse than — doing them too late. Think hard about when you start to invest in sales and marketing and when you start forecasting, you need to implement roles and controls.”

Yesware founder and CEO Mathew Bellows

Matthew Bellows, co-founder of Yesware, an email provider for salespeople, agreed. “Don’t sell your product too soon. [That's a] hard lesson for a salesperson like me to learn but our board was very clear that I shouldn’t start selling the product before the product was getting tons of in-bound interest.”

2: Do everything. This is easy because you’ll have to, but embrace this opportunity to get outside your comfort zone. ”Founders should do every role first before hiring someone to take it over. This helps me understand who I’m hiring, what they should be good at, what they should be doing and how to measure their success,” said David Mytton, founder of Server Density, a London-based provider of server monitoring services

Karl Wirth, co-founder of Apptegic, which helps companies tailor content shown to website users based on who they are and their activities, agrees. “For the first year and a half, I was our only salesperson.” This meant he learned how to cold call prospects, to cull the live ones. And to assess that person’s problem then work overtime to close the deal.”I knew sales would be important — I didn’t expect it to also shape and refine us so profoundly,” he said.

GrabCAD founder Hardi Meybaum.

Hardi Meybaum, co-founder and CEO of GrabCAD, an online marketplace for mechanical engineers, is all over this notion. “You are engineer, then product manager, then sales manager, then you’re raising money, then you hire smarter people than yourself to run product, engineering, sales, and marketing and then you need to lead by trust and great communication,” Meybaum said.

Apptegic founder Karl Wirth.

3: People are your biggest asset. Hire carefully. Mytton feels founders need to hold off on any new hires until things start hurting. “Hiring ahead of demand is the fastest way to burn through money,” he said. But, conversely, founders always need to look for new talent — perhaps for hiring down the road. “You should always be interviewing and always be hiring regardless of your headcount plan,” says Stackdriver co-founder Izzy Azeri. “It’s so hard to find good people and the founder is always the best recruiter.”

4: It’s all about the user, stupid. Ok, that’s harsh. But any startup or older company that loses its focus on the customer and solving a customer problem is toast.

“If you are genuinely helping people work more effectively, you will get pulled into companies,” said Yesware’s Bellows. “The days of selling to the IT department and the office of CIO are coming to an end. Frankly, the days of sales-and-markeing-driven companies are coming to an end.” So, talk to your users and perhaps more importantly, listen to your users.

Cloze co-founders Dan Foody (left) and Alex Cote.

5: Be prepared to fail. Expect it; it’s part of the gig. Dan Foody, co-founder of Cloze, the maker of an iOS app that consolidates a user’s mail and social media messages, said anyone in that line of work should heed Path CEO Dave Morin’s adage that the first version of any mobile app will fail.

Morin’s right, says Foody. ”The real reason is that Apple restricts developers to at most 100 beta test devices for any app. In today’s world that’s not nearly a large enough audience to refine an app (especially a consumer-focused one),” he said.

“You need hundreds to thousands of beta testers. How can you avoid this pitfall?  Build a web app first so you can learn the hard lessons up front with a wide audience without being restricted by platform and store limitations.”

That’s a good micro example, but generally speaking, failure is how we learn. So founders: be prepared to fail. It can be a badge of honor, especially if you learn from the experience.

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Philip Jacob

Jacob founded StyleFeeder in 2003 to help people sift through millions of online items to find and buy stuff they want.

“In today’s terms, it’s like Pinterest with a Netflix-style recommendation-style algorithm on top, ” Jacob told me in an interview. The service, in the pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook era, grew to one million registered users, mostly women, and competed with Like.com and Shopstyle, he said.

Magazines like Elle — seeking to augment ad revenue — partnered with the service and Elle’s owner, Time Inc., ended up buying StyleFeeder in early 2010 for a reported “eight figures.”

Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver, is thrilled to have Jacob aboard. “He’s a well-known mentor in the Boston area and is much sought after. He turned down two other CTO jobs to come here,” he said.

Stackdriver, which launched  this summer out of a conference room at Northeastern University, is now installed in a real office near Boston’s Innovation District and has grown from four to nine employees, Jacob said.

Asked why he picked Stackdriver over other suitors, Jacob said that while he loved the cloud computing space, “it’s really about the team. These are the people I want to spend time with.”

Jacobs will be a member of the company’s core engineering team. The company is avoiding titles, Belcher said.

Stackdriver was founded by Belcher and Izzy Azeri, both VMware veterans. Jeremy Katz, a DevOps expert who spent time at Hubspot, is also aboard.

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The company, which has thus far operated in stealth out of a conference room at Northeastern University, has also garnered some pretty impressive talent. Dale Christian, CIO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is on the advisory board.  Ben Holtzman, a Bain partner, and Ben Nye, a managing director joined the board of directors.

“Our mission is pretty bold: to be the platform and brain at the center that delivers on the promise of utility computing,” Stackdriver co-founder Dan Belcher told me in an interview. “This means we will integrate with other systems — Amazon Web Services, CloudWatch etc., and drive automation working with companies like Opscode,” he said.

“The whole idea of utility computing should be that you as a customer – everyone we talked to said even if we’re not running across multiple clouds that’s only because the tools weren’t here,” he said.

Belcher and co-founder Izzy Azeri are both VMware veterans, and Belcher did stints at Microsoft and Sonian, while Azeri worked at EMC and Acronis. Jeremy Katz, a DevOps expert who has been with Hubspot, is also aboard.

The funding will be used to hire engineers and build out the product, Belcher said.

This is indeed an ambitious project for a four-person start-up.  Legacy systems management companies like CA and BMC are attacking the same problem while newer DevOps tools purveyors are also coming up the stack to offer more cloud management capabilities.

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