Brian Vallelunga was a lead software engineer at Uber when he realized that tech companies of all sizes were facing the same problem. They couldn’t figure out how to manage their secrets—any highly-sensitive information used by software to authorize another service.
“When I talked to people at Uber, they were really struggling,” says Vallelunga. “They’re very well-funded. They have the means to solve this problem, and they were still struggling. I talked to Airbnb; I talked to individual, hobbyist developers. No matter how much money was thrown at the problem, everyone was struggling.”
Wanting to find a solution, Vallelunga quit his day job in 2018 and began working on Doppler, a secrets-management platform that allows apps to remain secure across projects and environments. To date, the company has attracted investments from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Peter Thiel, among others. Five years after Doppler’s launch, Vallelunga says that secrets management is still a pressing issue.
“Software companies are using more services than ever before, so there are more secrets to be managed,” he says. “Engineering teams are also getting bigger. As things get bigger, companies move faster, and there’s a higher chance they accidentally leak their secrets. In the business world, one password [leak] can mean everyone’s medical or financial information [becomes public].”
Vallelunga says spreading the word about Doppler is one of his biggest obstacles. “We have hundreds of companies signing up every single day, but how do we get that into thousands of companies? The biggest focus for us right now is going really strong on awareness.” A.I. is another challenge. “In five, 10 years’ time, there’s going to be developers writing code and A.I. writing code. As an engineering community, [we] don’t know what that means for us just yet.”
To relax, Vallelunga channels his fascination with tech in a different direction.
“I make art on my iPad and print it onto metal canvases,” he says. “They’re magnetically attached to the wall. I decorate my home with them. Hopefully someday we will decorate other places—maybe an art exhibit.”
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
