Joyent is a Cloud Computing vendor of 'Infrastructure as a Service' (IaaS). Their main product is a line of virtualized servers called Joyent Accelerators. They focus on helping their clients move quickly from an idea to a web application with millions of users with the goal of saving customers from the pain of large capital outlays and long-term vendor contracts.

Their competition could be every company's own infrastructure build out so to counter that Joyent aims to offer a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to buying and running systems directly.

According to Joyent's website, their clients include ABC/Disney, LinkedIn, SympathyTree, Major League Baseball's MLB.com, the hit shopping site Gilt.com, and over 25% of the daily active application usage on Facebook. The largest application running on Joyent is LinkedIn's Bumpersticker Facebook app, which does over 1 Billion page views a month. Joyent is also the official hosting provider for Ruby On Rails and the official host for Hi5 application developers.

David Young, CEO and Founder of Joyent spoke to me about the company's beginnings, where they are trying to go and how the recessionary cycle is affecting the company.

Here is some information about David from Joyent's website:

"David founded Joyent in 2004 to provide a comprehensive suite of internet-delivered software and on-demand infrastructure for small to medium organizations. Prior to Joyent, David worked at Moody's Investor Service (1989-1999) in the Structured Finance, International, and Digital Media groups as General Manager and corporate Vice President and was co-founder and CTO of manageStar (2000-2004), an enterprise services management software company whose customers included TimeWarner, Sodexho, and Global Signal. David was the principal architect of manageStar's Harmony platform for service delivery and managed a team of 80 developers in San Francisco and Bangalore, India. David holds a BA in Classics (Greek), cum laude, from Indiana University. He lives in the joyent lifestyle in Marin County with his wife Maria and their two daughters."

Erik Levy: Can you tell me a little about your background?

David Young: Sure. I have a Bachelors degree in the Classics, and worked on Wall Street in Structured Finance. I have experience in high tech platforms and I have worked at a number of startups. I started Joyent in 2004 with Jason Hoffman.

Erik Levy: What does Joyent focus on?

David Young: Our core users are small companies or developers who are using a framework like Rails, PHP, Python or similar and they want a scalable infrastructure. That means scaling up or down in terms of capacity.

Erik Levy: What made you want to start a business?

David Young: Well, for one thing, layoffs don't happen at startups unless the business is not going to work. Also, I hate working for other people and this affords me the opportunity to work for myself with a great team. Ultimately, the businesses' success is based on your own work.

Erik Levy: I think those points are probably true for a lot of founders. I've heard that numerous times. What about Venture Capital? Has Joyent taken any?

David Young: We have not taken Venture Capital. We didn't want any restrictions or forced direction. We knew this would be a slow simmer and growth opportunity and didn't want VC targets. Intuitional investors want the opposite of what entrepreneurs want; they want as much control as they can get via entrepreneurs spending lots of money quickly. Entrepreneurs want to keep as much control as possible and have high valuations.

Erik Levy: Can you talk about how you handle ownership of the company?

David Young: Each employee has an ownership stake. In fact, each employee had been a customer before coming to work at Joyent.

Erik Levy: How did Joyent link up with Facebook?

David Young: A customer introduced us to Facebook. We offer a free Joyent accelerator for Facebook developers that has been very popular.

Erik Levy: How has the economic recession been affecting business?

David Young: Business has never been better. Businesses are trying to reduce capital expenditures, and less upfront capital investment has less risk. We never had the luxury to not run the business from revenue; you see Venture Capitalists now telling their portfolio companies they should focus on making money but we never had capability to have a mindset to wait for revenue. In fact, the economy is offering opportunities for acquisitions of weakened VC backed companies. For example, we just announced the acquisition of the Smart Platform; it does auto-scaling for Javascript applications.

Erik Levy: Do you have any recommendations for entrepreneurs?

David Young: Sure. Try to keep your costs as low as possible until you have a revenue model. It is better to wait until you have a revenue model before taking venture capital. You can be in a position then to use it to supercharge growth. Companies that take it at the start are just being lazy. Try to learn how your business model is flawed as early on as possible and it is okay to fail as long as you learn from it.

David Young: New entrepreneurs don't understand the things that will kill them. There are only one or two things they need to focus on (1) product and (2) consumers. A lot of times they focus on the competition but that is just a distraction.

Erik Levy: Anything else?

David Young: Everyone should try being at a startup at least once. Being part of one is a privilege even with those gut-wrenching moments.