Our Origin Story

Every now and then, it’s helpful to go back and remember why we started. Our story is simple and grounded in our collective experience on the front lines. It always starts the same way: a phone call in the middle of the night, something’s broken, and no one really knows why.

We’ve been on that call more times than we can count, and so have my co-founders. Between us, we’ve kept systems alive for AWS, Meta, the Pentagon, and beyond. The names change, the stacks change, but the chaos feels the same. Someone spins up a Slack channel, people start digging into their slice of the system, trading around screenshots, and combing through metrics, logs, and traces.

Despite all the observability dashboards we had set up, it still felt like we’re piecing together a puzzle in the dark.

Eventually it hit us: visibility wasn’t the problem. We could see everything, just not together. What we were missing was perspective.

Perspective is knowing how the pieces fit. It’s connecting a weird metric spike to a service quirk from six months ago. It’s understanding what’s noise and what’s the thread worth pulling. 

After years of chasing root causes through noisy, disconnected tools, we set out to build something better: a way to make complex systems understandable, so teams can respond faster, smarter, and with confidence.

That’s why Flip isn’t about more alerts or prettier charts. We built Flip to meet teams where they are, work with the environments they already use, and prove itself in the heat of a real incident.

If you’ve been on that middle-of-the-night call, you know exactly why we started.

— Corey