Airbnb for Data Centers — Handoyo, Founder & CEO of Lyrid
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Handoyo is the founder and CEO of Lyrid, a cloud infrastructure platform he describes as “Airbnb for data centers.” It pulls compute, storage and networking from local data centers and hyperscalers into one platform and sells it to startups and enterprises at 40–60% less than the big providers charge. Before Lyrid he was a solutions engineer at an infrastructure company, helping build data centers. He sat on the gap he saw there for two to three years before starting the company in 2019, and didn’t raise until 2023. Mash and Handoyo get into why free credits are built to lock you in, running independent teams in Indonesia and Kenya, and why, for engineers turned founders, the product is less than 10% of the company.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
“Airbnb for data centers”
Introduce yourself, and tell us about Lyrid and what you do.
I’m the CEO and founder of Lyrid. Lyrid is a cloud infrastructure platform. We aggregate cloud resources from many different local data centers and other places, including hyperscalers, and connect them into our platform. I like to tell people to think about it like Airbnb for data centers.
Data centers are real estate — real estate that contains resources: compute, storage, networks. We put those resources into our platform and sell them directly to end users. Most of them are startups, plus small and medium enterprises.
Before Lyrid existed, if I was a startup building software that was going to live in the cloud, why wouldn’t I just go to AWS?
That’s usually how people go — AWS, GCP, Azure, what we call the hyperscalers. That’s the easy route, and it’s actually okay. We work with them too. When end users build their apps, they need to put them somewhere out there, in what they call the cloud. But the cloud itself is actually just a set of infrastructure.
Like Airbnb. I could go to Marriott and get a hotel, but Airbnb said that’s not your only option anymore. And I work with a lot of founders who, because of Claude Code and Codex, are building apps for the first time. The next thing they ask me is, “Where do I put this?” That’s the problem that sends someone looking for a solution like Lyrid.
Same model. What I learned is that there are actually a lot of other data centers out there. And we provide a different experience than the hyperscalers. First of all, we work with local data centers, so if you want your data more local, to serve more local ecosystems, we partner a lot with local providers. That’s what we’ve worked on the most, because we want to support that ecosystem of providers, not so much the hyperscalers.
Is there value beyond supporting local? Privacy, regional scoping? Why would you want that versus the global footprint of AWS?
Cost is a big one. If you know the hyperscalers’ business model, the reason they give out a lot of these credits is that they want to lock you in, and get you to put as much resource as possible into that thing. For us, we give the best pricing up front, because the ecosystem itself supports it. I can give you a price that is 40% less — sometimes almost 50, and up to about 60% less — than what the big vendors are charging.
That’s because the cost structure — the machines, the infrastructure, the network, the egress — is different in these local data centers. They don’t have egress fees. They don’t have a lot of things the big guys usually charge for. And we’ve always built for cost predictability. We’re not trying to say, “I can give you $10,000 in credit for free.” I’m saying, “I can give you the lowest price that you can sustain this thing forever.” My goal is always to support founders, so they can sustain this for as long as they can and stretch it out as long as they can.
So they don’t hit that cliff where the free credits run out, and now they have to raise money because they’re spending too much.
I would much rather charge little by little, until you get to a point where you can make enough profit.
What’s the switching size? And what about founders still in customer discovery, throwing MVPs up to test them?
My sweet spot is about a thousand-something. If you already spend about $1,000, you can already see the benefits. But you can start as small or as big as you want. The free tier runs three containers — front end, back end, workers — plus a free tier on a database, so anybody can start building something simple. Above that is what we call Pro, which is 50 bucks a month and lets you create many different environments. After that you get your own infrastructure, which usually starts at about 200 bucks, and you can keep growing your clusters from there.
One of the solutions I use, because it’s so dead simple, is Heroku. How does yours compare?
My solution is almost as simple. If you’ve used Heroku before, you probably know how to use our platform. The difference is that you can control where you’re deploying. They don’t tell you where they put it. If you have a workload in Heroku and you want to run that in your own data centers, I think you’re going to need to rewrite some stuff.
“You’ll never feel ready”
A lot of founders start, realize it was a bad idea, and go away. How did you get from realizing there was a potential company here to where you are now? You’re funded, right?
$1.6 million. And that’s a long step, by the way. It’s not a one-day thing. It’s a multi-year step. I’ve seen companies that started because the founder just felt like it, and those are usually the worst. The good ones get the problem from their own experience and notice some kind of gap they can fill. Those are usually the best founders, in my opinion at least.
For me, it came out of my own experience working at another startup, working in the data centers, looking at racks and racks of machines every single day. When I started this, I was still working as a solutions engineer for an infrastructure company. They built their own products and their own servers, so I helped build data centers — put the stack together, compute, network. Back then it was still pretty early, even for AWS. AWS only had S3.
After a while working with that company, I saw the gap: there’s actually a lot of infrastructure out there. I always wondered why people go to AWS or Google or one of those guys all the time. It’s like going to McDonald’s. It’s the default. But if you know how McDonald’s is made, you want to do it yourself — “I think I can do one better.” Still, the simplicity of what they give out is good for a lot of people. And that’s what the data center operators are missing. They survive because industries like healthcare and fintech still need that type of infrastructure, but they don’t get the startups. Nowadays, because of AI, they do — it’s a totally different ball game. But back then, I was seeing: there’s something here. There’s a gap.
I’m sure you were making a ton of money, so you didn’t really do this to make money. When did you say, “I’m ready”?
People usually ask me this: when do you feel like you’re ready? Even now, I don’t feel like I’m ready. If you want to just do it, just do it. You’ll never feel ready. You’ll never feel good enough.
It wasn’t a one-day decision for me. Identifying the gap was two to three years before I started the company, and I sat on it. I’d thought about it for a while, and I knew I was going to do it, so I was preparing my war chest — my ammunition — as much as I could. Before I started this company — it was 2019, by the way. And you know how it was in 2020. You can prepare as much as you want, but you can’t prepare for that. The world is going to throw things at you.
“That’s your pressure test”
So how did you get to the place most founders want to get to so badly — getting someone to believe in you enough to fund you?
Again, I started the company in 2019, but I didn’t actually fundraise until 2023. And it wasn’t by myself — there were a couple of people helping me. During Covid, we’d just started, and there was nothing much we could do about it. So we went back to the drawing board, to get ready for when things started to open back up: refine the idea so we could pitch it to investors. We decided we were going to join an accelerator. We joined Expert Dojo, in LA.
Did you have to pay to be in it? And at demo day, did somebody hand you a check?
They invest in you. They put in $50,000, I think, and you give them something for their program, which is about two months, with a demo day after. But that check moment very rarely happens. We met two or three times after the demo day, and then we got our first VC check, and then a few angels.
Now other people own parts of your company, and you have responsibilities to all of them. How has that changed your feeling about being in a startup?
It doesn’t change that much. I still love it. If anything, I feel a bigger sense of responsibility. Once you start handling other people’s investment, other people’s money, you want to see that this thing actually goes through. You want to make as many things work as possible. The pressure is just going to get higher and higher as you get more and more invested. And that’s actually your pressure test.
I experienced this with my first company: once you start raising, you never stop. It’s your job now. True for you?
It’s true. If you raised from angels and people a bit closer to you, it might be easier not to. But make sure you have certain milestones you want to reach first. We’re in the middle of our second fundraise, and I’m sure that even when we close this one, I’m going to start drafting the next fundraise, for our Series A.
Let’s not scare them away. What can you tell people that says, “Stay the course, it’s worth it”? Was there ever a moment where you thought, “This is not going to work — we should give this money back”?
The thought does sometimes appear in the head. It’s not going to be rosy, and it’s not going to be sunshine all the time. If people think this is TechCrunch all day, all night, people signing checks left and right — it’s not like that, man.
So what is it like?
For me, day to day: I wake up, I solve problems, I help people, and I feel accomplished. I think that’s why I do this, most days. I never felt that kind of impact in another industry, working for somebody else. Even the little things I do make a lot of changes in somebody else’s life. That’s the one you cannot put a price on.
“Your product actually is probably less than 10% of what you think it is.”
— Handoyo · Inspiring Founders Podcast, Ep. 09
That’s probably because you’re so close to the customer. You don’t have a sales team, so customers are telling you directly, “This used to suck, and you saved me.”
One of the customers we help told me straight to my face that if we didn’t exist, they would have already folded. They were in the middle of — almost dead, basically. “Dude, without you guys, we’d have already folded, and we’re in the green right now.”
And look, I help a lot with emerging markets, by the way. That’s one of the things I’m passionate about.
“This is why I do this”
Wait, explain this. I’m so ethnocentric — I thought we were talking about Silicon Valley. How does your business help people in an emerging market halfway across the world?
After our first fundraise, we started to build the company in Indonesia as well as the US, and with the second fundraise I started another entity in Kenya. Every single country where we have an entity is independent. Lyrid USA owns those entities, but they work as their own startup. I want to build it like that so they have their own authority on who to hire and who to keep. In Indonesia and in Kenya, they look for their own local data center partners. They have their own ecosystem, their own customer set and their own operations.
So they capture the experience of being local. You’re like, “Dude, you’re there. Figure it out.”
Exactly. The hard part in emerging markets is that a lot of people don’t have the same buying power as the US. A subscription that costs 50 bucks over here — nobody thinks twice. They put in the credit card and move on. Over there, they’ll think that’s a lot. And the price of infrastructure — servers from AWS, Google or whoever — in some cases is actually more in the emerging markets. The same amount of resource to run the same number of users costs them more, and they need to serve more customers to make their money back. The unit economics never make sense.
Giving them these options saves them money — gives them better margins, makes them a better company. I cannot buy that feeling. I want that feeling all over again, every time.
I tell brand-new founders: don’t find technology you’re excited about and try to build it. Find a customer you can fall in love with — somebody you care about enough to truly help for 10 years. You sound very mission-driven.
Knowing why you do this, and making sure you stay true to it, is what keeps you from going insane. If you have that “this is why I do this” moment, you want to save that and replicate it. You want to make it 10 times. You want to do that more and more.
It’s easy to say, “I want to do a startup because I want to make money.” That’s very short-term thinking, and I don’t think you’ll last too long. But it’s okay if you want to make money. Money makes you feel good. But customers who tell you that you saved their life — that feels really good.
So how do you stay focused on that? What happens when Amazon says, “We want to buy you guys”?
When that happens, I’ll let you know. I didn’t even think about that. There’s nothing wrong with acquisitions, M&As and all those things. It doesn’t cross my mind, at this moment at least. Of course I’ll look at every term sheet. If it does happen, then I’ll think about it.
How do you balance that mission with your responsibility to shareholders? Have you felt tension — you want to keep going into emerging markets, and they’re saying, “Why don’t you just make a whole bunch of money here right now?”
I’ve felt that sometimes, mostly through outside opinions, but some of the investors do say that. The way I see it, it’s still your company. You’re the steward of the company. They want you to succeed as well, because there’s more money in certain places. Which is why we’re also still in the US, by the way — still serving the US, still looking for customers in the US. I help build a lot of AI solutions in the US, which does make more margin. There’s always a balancing act between investors and your mission.
There’s AI you build into your product, and AI you use to run your business. Which do you do?
We do both. We serve AI solutions and we use AI internally. I tell every one of my engineers — some people call it token maxing — just use every tool at your disposal as much as possible. If it’s available to you and it makes you faster, use it. Don’t worry about it. At the end of the day, it’s not about cutting people’s jobs. It’s about producing more, and helping our customers better.
In the product, we’re integrating more AI for things like predictable downtime and deploying with chatbots. What I want to build is more contained AI, more sovereign AI. Everything we build, we need to be able to host ourselves and package ourselves. That’s my philosophy on it.
Sales, marketing, product
One of the things early founders always struggle with is getting out of the office and talking to people.
That’s one of the things I feel about aspiring founders: your product actually is probably less than 10% of what you think it is. It’s the whole ecosystem. Whenever you start a company, there are three things you need to care about: sales, marketing, product. But especially people who come from an engineering background only see product first, and they neglect the other two. You have something, but it’s not a company without the others. Spending time on the things you’re not strong at is what makes you a holistic founder.
So I would suggest that if you come from an engineering background, do sales and marketing. Your engineering background is still going to be there. It’s not going to go away.
But they’re terrified.
That’s the hump they need to jump over, because there are going to be so many more terrifying things you’re going to need to do later. Just get over that hump, dude. Get out. Go talk to people. Go talk to your business majors or whatever.
The hardest thing about those three is that if you put a person from each in a room, it would be a bloodbath. They’ll fight to the death. Even Dropbox, the perfect product-led growth company, eventually had to do sales.
Exactly. A good company balances the whole thing, and they need to grow at the same time. You cannot play favorites. You need to make sales, dude, and you need to market. People need to know about it. At the end of the day, a sustainable company is a company that can sustain itself. And how do you sustain yourself? By getting more customers, not by getting more investors.
The day-to-day isn’t going to be rosy every day. It is very mundane, and you’re going to be dealing with a lot of people. Regardless of whether there’s AI or not, you’re still going to need to deal with people.
“Larger enterprise ready”
Before we wrap up: you’re in the middle of a round right now.
We’re raising $2 million, and we’ve already raised $600K. We’re raising at $15 million post, and this is our seed round. We’re planning to use it to get us to other regions, as well as to expand our product lines so that we’re more ready for larger enterprises. I call it larger enterprise ready. We want to build compliance, certifications and enough trust factors into our product line that we can handle bigger and bigger customers. Some of the sales hindrances we’ve found revolve around that. I’m not saying I don’t want to work with startups anymore.
That makes a lot of sense. I’ve worked with startups that grew to the point where they were ready to work with the government or universities, and they got stopped dead in their tracks by compliance. You’ve got to watch the episode I did with Raymond Cheng — he’s another local guy, a compliance guy.
We’re looking for partners. I don’t want to build all those compliance solutions myself. I’m looking for people and companies that want to put this together with me. With this fundraise, we’re looking to get to $2 million ARR, and then we’re going to raise our Series A at some point.
Congratulations. Say someone watching this thinks, “That’s interesting.” What else would an investor need to know about Lyrid?
We’re in three different regions. We’re at $720K bookings ARR at this moment, with about 23 enterprise customers that average about a thousand bucks a month with us, going up to about $5K per month. The largest region is still the US. As I mentioned, we want to build more on the larger-enterprise side, and we’re looking for lead investors as well — people who can help us with our Series A. So anybody interested, let me know. Email me.
Investors bring connections, not just money. What’s the right kind of investor for you?
For me, the good match is investors who have an infrastructure background — people who know this business a bit more. People who can help us with our Series A. What we lack right now is more on the operational side — finance, CFOs, all those things — so people who want to help us in that realm. I’m also looking for another co-founder, more sales-focused: someone who can help us build the sales operation. RevOps, they call it.
And more global-minded investors. There’s no right or wrong answer — it’s a different thesis. But some investors do want us to just stay in the US and work on the US. Part of why I built the company is the emerging markets, the global play. I don’t think I can take that away. That needs to work for me to be able to show that this model works.
More conversations with founders on the Inspiring Founders Podcast.