Christine Yen is the co-founder of Honeycomb, a startup with an innovative approach to mapping and debugging systems with data. Honeycomb focuses on what’s known as observability – a fast growing field of engineering that essentially makes sure data-driven systems remain “healthy” and glitch-free. Honeycomb popularized the term “observability,” and works to help engineers proactively prevent system bugs and minimize downtime when updates do become necessary.
Yen says Honeycomb’s goal is not to magically fix relatively easy problems. Instead, she said, the goal is to make previously intractable data problems solvable.
When Yen co-founded the company in 2016 in the San Francisco Bay area, she and co-founder Charity Majors expected an evolving IT landscape that would be transformed by more sophisticated bundles of software – products like microservices and “containerized” services – that would require new approaches to monitoring and debugging.
As it turns out, the hedged bet has now landed the company a $50 million investment, which it announced on April 6, 2023. The new investment brings the total raised by the company to nearly $150 million.
“What we saw in 2015 and 2016 is the world moving in a direction where that complexity was unavoidable whether in a heightened interest in being able to do things like breakdown by customer ID or this exploding complexity that was about to come onto the scene driven by Kubernetes, microservices and containers,” Yen told TechCrunch. “We [believed] the world [was] going to need a tool like this that allows users to have both speed and flexibility.”
Yen’s predictions about the changes in the IT world put her team in the right place at the right time to take advantage, with Honeycomb at the forefront of the shift. Now, Honeycomb has up to 200 employees and more than 600 customers worldwide, with a net revenue retention of more than 160%.
Yen has built systems and products at both large and small companies and enjoys having her hands in as many honey pots as possible. Previously, she built Parse’s analytics product and leveraged Facebook’s data systems to expand it, and wrote software at a few now-defunct startups. She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Outside of work, she keeps busy with her two dogs and enjoys science fiction and fantasy books.