YESPRESS · PERSON · FOUNDER
Alan Shreve
The quiet operator behind the tunnel under the internet - the one your localhost goes through when you finally show the demo to the boss.
A. Shreve, on a Tuesday.
The quiet operator behind the tunnel under the internet - the one your localhost goes through when you finally show the demo to the boss.
Alan Shreve runs ngrok from 548 Market Street, a few blocks from the part of San Francisco where companies put their addresses to look serious. The company sells something most developers learned to love before they learned to pay for it: a way to point the internet at a service running on their laptop. About five million of them used the free tier before Shreve raised a dime.
He raised the dime, eventually. In December 2022, ngrok closed a $50 million Series A. Seven years had passed since he wrote the first version as a side project. In startup time, that is a geologic age. In Shreve's telling, it was just the part where he was busy.
The problem Shreve was actually trying to solve, the first time he opened a text editor with ngrok on his mind, was embarrassingly mundane. He worked at Twilio. He was building messaging features. To test what he was building, he had to dial a real phone, route the call across the public telephone network, into Twilio's data center, out to a webhook, and back to a service running on his own machine. He measured this trip once and called it "a really, really expensive HTTP request."
Existing tunneling tools existed. LocalTunnel was a favorite. None of them did exactly what he wanted, and none of them were written in Go, the language he had decided to learn next. So he wrote his own. He gave it a name that sounded like a verb. He put it online. People started using it.
He kept his day job. He paid for the first server with a credit card. The first customers covered the bill within weeks, then within days. The free tier handed every user a branded ngrok.io URL, which they then pasted into Slack channels and conference slides, which sent the next batch of users back to ngrok. A growth loop without a growth team.
For most of its life, ngrok ran on the financial logic of a corner store. Customers paid. Servers got bigger. Shreve hired carefully or not at all. He maintained other open source projects on the side - structured logging, RPC primitives, a tool for building self-updating Go binaries that became its own small company called equinox.io. He wrote about software on a personal blog that lives at the same address as his GitHub handle: inconshreveable.com.
The handle is an anagram-adjacent inside joke, the kind a programmer chooses at 22 and then has to keep explaining to investors at 38. Shreve seems unbothered. His public writing is technical and unsentimental. His talks at QCon are full of architecture diagrams and very few origin myths.
Ngrok, the company, is roughly 83 people. Ngrok, the product, has stopped being a tunnel and started being an ingress platform - the thing in front of your service that handles TLS, routing, authentication, observability, and rate limiting before the request ever touches your code. The pitch has shifted from "share your localhost" to "replace your load balancer, your gateway, your auth proxy, and the half-finished thing you wrote in Python to do all three."
The technology decisions still bear Shreve's fingerprints. Heavy use of Go. Heavy use of open source. A preference for libraries that do one thing and explain themselves. The product runs on Amazon AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and a small constellation of streaming tools - Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, ClickHouse - that suggests the operations team has gotten serious about telemetry without getting precious about it.
Shreve's resume before ngrok reads like a tour of companies developers respect: one of the first engineers at Twilio, then stops at Microsoft, VMware, Fog Creek, and Keen IO. He has talked publicly about being shaped by the messaging team at Twilio - what it taught him about the difference between a tool engineers tolerate and one they recommend. He picked the second category and stayed there.
The closest thing to a Shreve thesis is something he repeats in interviews without dressing it up: build a thing people want, charge a fair price, listen to the people who actually use it, and resist the urge to confuse momentum with growth. Bootstrapping was not a brand. It was a forcing function.
The $50 million round did not, as far as anyone can tell, change Shreve's personal velocity. He still ships code. He still answers GitHub issues. He still speaks at conferences. The company has hired sales and security and platform engineers, but the founder's job, from the outside, looks a lot like it did in 2016: figure out the next part of the product, write some of it, ship the rest, do not panic.
If there is an ambition lurking inside the calm, it is the one he stated at QCon: a single API for ingress. Connectivity, identity, observability, all in one place, all callable. The kind of product that does not announce itself until you notice every team in your company depends on it.
By that measure, ngrok is already most of the way there. The notice is the slow part.
User figures pieced together from public interviews and the company's own retrospectives. Treat as shape, not gospel.
One of the first engineers at Twilio. Builds out the messaging team. Learns what developers actually file tickets about.
Engineering stops at Microsoft, VMware, Fog Creek, and Keen IO. Picks up a habit of writing open source between contracts.
Releases ngrok. A learn-Go project that solves his own Twilio-webhook-testing problem turns into a service.
Co-founds equinox.io with collaborators - a build and distribution service for Go binaries with self-update baked in.
Bootstrapped growth. No outside capital. Ngrok URLs spread through conference talks, blog posts, and Slack channels.
$50 million Series A. First institutional check. Headcount grows to roughly 83. The product becomes an "ingress platform."
Keynotes and talks at QCon San Francisco and QCon New York on developer infrastructure and the future of ingress.
Still shipping code. Still answering GitHub issues. Still operating out of 548 Market Street.
"I create things, mostly software."
- About page, inconshreveable.com"ngrok's success as a project is due in no small part to choosing Go as the implementation language."
- Twilio Spotlight"I realized I am starting an audio/signaling connection to a cellular tower and it's being transmitted over the PSTN through multiple providers, into Twilio's data center which is making an HTTP request to my tunnel services, and then sending it through to my local service. That's a really, really expensive HTTP request."
- On why ngrok existed in the first place"Hacker and Entrepreneur."
- Speaker bio, QCon SF 2023Online identity is inconshreveable. The domain, the GitHub, the Twitter, the LinkedIn vanity URL - all the same word.
GitHub achievements include Arctic Code Vault Contributor and Starstruck x4 - the latter awarded for crossing user-star thresholds.
Equinox.io, the side company, helps other Go developers do what ngrok originally did: ship a self-updating binary without thinking about it.
He has spoken at QCon multiple times. The talks tend to be about systems, not about the founder journey.
The ngrok HQ address is 548 Market Street, the same building block where dozens of San Francisco software companies park their LLCs.
The product runs on a wall of internal acronyms: AWS, EC2, Kubernetes, Kafka, Flink, ClickHouse, Iceberg, Dagster. The website runs on Webflow.