How Glimpsed Used Brev.dev To Streamline Due Diligence During Their Acquisition

Find out how Helena Merk and Brian Li, co-founders of Glimpse (YC W20), used Brev.dev for due diligence during their acquisition.

Helena Merk and Brian Li are the founders of Glimpse (YC W20), a “speed matching” platform designed for virtual events.

With the pandemic forcing events and businesses to go virtual and remote, Glimpse’s idea was to offer a way to facilitate the connections that typically took place at real-world events, and bring them online by intelligently matching attendees within video calls.

In 2020, Glimpse facilitated over 1 million matches and many millions of minutes of conversation for thousands of organizations. And once Zoom began to allow for native application integrations in 2021, Glimpse dove head first and became one of the first apps to launch natively in Zoom.

How Brev.dev Simplified the Acquisition Process For Glimpse

In Feb 2022, Glimpse was acquired by twine, a company that provides networking tools for virtual events and remote teams. As with any acquisition, this involved Glimpse undergoing due diligence of their business and technology.

‍ Due diligence of the technology is often a difficult process where a technical founder needs to onboard the acquirer to their tech stack, make sure their environment is up and running, and go through a full demo of the product running locally. Typically, this single aspect of the acquisition process can take about two months.

Rather than go through this tedious process, Glimpse used Brev.dev’s reproducible environments. It’s simple – by sharing a generated link, Glimpse invited twine to their Brev.dev organization, giving twine instant access to a cloud-based development environment with Glimpse already running. The environment was already configured and the localhost servers were running on public urls.

We had quite a few concerns about how to securely share our code base during the technical due diligence phase without giving full access to our GitHub repos. The solution needed to accomplish the following:

• Provide the other team with access to read through all of our code without cloning it to their local computer
• Allow us to easily revoke access if necessary
• Easily spin up a demo environment for the other team without having to install > Mongo, Docker, Redis, etc.

Brev was able to meet all of these requirements and made securely sharing our code easy!

-Brian Li (Glimpse founder)

Even after the acquisition, twine can easily spin up Glimpse since Glimpse’s knowledge of how to run everything was encoded into Brev. This was also more secure, as Glimpse never had to add the acquiring company to their code repositories for diligence calls.

Brev.dev can help make your due diligence process a lot smoother and is ideal for acquisitions. However, some engineers at Glimpse are now using Brev.dev for their daily development. They never have to fudge with their environments, and Brev.dev makes their computer a lot faster since the code actually executes on dedicated ram, cpu and with 100x internet speed.

"Everything's running like 3x faster" - Oli (Software Engineer at Glimpse)

Cloud-based dev environments are really powerful but used to require coding in a web browser or lock-in to a certain set of tools. Brev.dev runs in the background of your local computer so you can use your same tools. Take it for a spin or get in touch.