‘Take 5’ with topLog CEO Ozge Yeloglu

Ozge Yeloglu is the cofounder and CEO of topLog, a predictive data analysis tool for DevOps teams. The idea for topLog was inspired by her team’s experience as a graduate student doing research in computer science. When an IT system or application crashed, it often took teams hours to dig through massive amounts of log files to uncover the source of the problem. They knew there had to be a better way.

We caught up with Ozge to learn more about her journey as a founder, and her aspirations and future goals for topLog.

What is the most rewarding part of running your own business?

Controlled chaos. Every day is chaotic in a start up but I feel like I have the power to control it. Even though that is not true many days, even the idea of “I have the power to control it” makes a control freak like me feel better.

What advice would you give yourself before founding topLog?

Start small. Because our technology is based on PhD research, we had many features of our product ready when we started. However, it was very challenging to build them all at once in an early stage product. I would start with one main feature and get users based on that and keep adding more features on top of it. Sounds very obvious when I say it now, it wasn’t then.

What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?

Showing the value of our technology to our users. We were three PhD level Data Scientists when we started topLog. I put a very ugly (looked cool then) UI together which would make sense to any data scientist but not to a DevOps engineer. I realized that after a few meetings with potential users and seeing their confused faces. We now have a brilliant UI/UX developer working with us but simplifying the UI while presenting all the information to the user is a continuous challenge.

What are key milestones that must be achieved in the next 6-12 months?

Creating more partnerships. Our first partnership, which happens to be with Bitnami, has proved to us the importance of teaming up with others in our market. It increases visibility, brings us necessary users to fine-tune our product while we scale, and open ourselves up to new opportunities as well as complimenting others’ products, ultimately bringing the end users a more complete, all-in-one solution.

If you could be any superhero, which one could you be?

Iron man. I’m too realistic to believe in magical superheroes and I love technology.

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