Successful YC S13 Application

Jeremy and I incorporated Apptimize in February 2013 and applied to Y Combinator 2 months later. Below is our Y Combinator application because a lot of people ask to see it. If you’re in the Bay area and would like feedback on your application, shoot me a note and I’ll try to help because my Paul Graham simulator is pretty good (he’s always making fun of my Peter Thiel simulator though). You can read about my Y Combinator experience here. My next post will be about the many ways reality has revealed itself as different from what we saw when we wrote this application, because the competitive landscape has changed, we are now a 15 person company, and our users include the top apps in the world. I hope you find this useful and upvote/share this because I’m even including our embarrassing video. Good luck!

We were so young then...
We were so young then…

http://apptimize.com

What is your company going to make?

Apptimize lets you AB test mobile applications. You keep the native experience without needing to push changes blindly or rely on users to update. There’s a web interface to manage experiments, and a WYSIWYG interface for non-programmers. Apptimize removes the pain of designing a controlled experiment, serving variations, collecting results, and calculating statistical significance. Right now you have to be a developer and statistician to AB test a mobile app, but we make it so that non-programmers can AB test too. Apptimize makes optimization as easy for mobile as it is for web. Apptimize technology could transform the process of testing and pushing changes and be integrated into 100% of apps.

nancyhua; Nancy Hua; 27; 2007, MIT, Bachelors of Science Mathematics for Computer Science, Bachelors of Science Writing; nancyhua.com, @huanancy; GETCO algorithmic trader, Quantitative Strategies Team Leader

jorlow; Jeremy Orlow; 28; 2007, Purdue, Bachelors of Science Computer Science; @jeremyorlow; Software Engineer at Google, Software Engineer at Three Laws of Mobility (startup acquired by Motorola that was acquired by Google), DrawChat

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved.

Nancy: trader who ran the Fixed Income Quantitative Strategies team at GETCO (GETCO grew from 100 to 500 people to become the premiere algorithmic trading company); world class expert in Fixed Income trading and exchanges.

Jeremy: owned IndexedDB (the emerging w3c standard for storing data in a browser) within Chrome; edited the spec, worked closely with Mozilla and Microsoft on the design, and wrote most of the initial implementation in Chrome/WebKit; simultaneously started the London Chrome team.

Please tell us about the time you, nancyhua, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Nancy wanted to work in the Middle East but there wasn’t a culture of internships. Nancy discovered if she didn’t mention she was just a sophomore she could interview as a consultant (and get a company car and phone). She was the first student ever hired for Mercury’s R&D office in Israel (a load testing company acquired by HP).

At Google, Jeremy became an expert in free travel. After getting on shortlists for university recruiting, he positioned himself as a datacenter expert and visited many across America. After targeting developer relations, Jeremy got on the shortlist for places like Moscow, Berlin, Manila, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, giving talks, meeting partners, and exploring- all for free.

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

We prototyped an app called Firesale that helps people sell unwanted stuff. To create a market of buyers, we brought on full-time Craigslist market makers. The Craigslist expert users complained about the process of being first to email a poster, so we optimized the messaging to make transacting as fast for them as possible. They also complained about Craigslist lacking a reputation/identity system, so we implemented one. We put Firesale on hold to work on Apptimize.

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

We met a couple years ago through mutual friends and started working together when Jeremy convinced Nancy to leave NYC for the Bay.

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you’re making?

We picked this idea because Jeremy had looked for a mobile AB testing solution when working on Drawchat, but couldn’t find one. Three 50+ people companies, 3 YC companies, and 10+ indie developers have signed up to beta test our product. All the programmers/contractors we’ve interviewed have also asked to sign up for our private beta. This is an immediate need for most mobile companies.

Nancy is an expert in experiment design and data analysis. Jeremy is an expert in mobile and has built many efficient, scalable backends. We both love being data driven and view life as an experiment.

What’s new about what you’re making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn’t exist yet (or they don’t know about it)?

Most wait for app store approval and push many changes simultaneously. They eyeball the results and haphazardly rollback suspect changes.

Desperate people resort to basic, home-grown solutions. Because of other projects, Switchboard and Clutch.io evolved incomplete solutions (we noticed errors: randomization mistakes that mess up the experiments, poor error handling, malformed responses that’d crash your app!).

There hasn’t been much focused effort towards creating a seamless AB testing experience for native apps. AB testing for mobile is a technologically harder problem than for websites due to challenges particular to mobile devices (ie. intermittent internet, lack of cookies/iframes, users running different versions). Existing solutions ignore complexity whereas we view handling it as our core business.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

Several companies very recently entered the game. Swrve has so far focused on games. Pathmapp is focusing on overall analytics (pretty different from our approach). Abstate is unlaunched. Artisan and Arise.io have buggy, immature products. A risk is that Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely will decide to focus on expanding from websites into native apps. Native might be a natural next step for them since they offer web app support in premium plans, so we’ll grow aggressively.

We think there’s no dominant player because nobody has made anything good yet. Our goal is to be the best.

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?

Our competitors are developers building for other developers, so most only offer programmatic interfaces. We understand often the goal setters and decision makers aren’t programmers. Apptimize makes it simple for non-technical owners, product managers, designers, and marketers via a WYSIWYG interface and a website to control and create experiments.

Our experimental setup, results, and analysis will be superior. Stanford PhD’s helped with our statistics by pointing out problems with competitors’ setups (ie. fixed sample sizes, small data set handling).

We’ll target companies who don’t monetize through app sales, instead using apps for branding, coupons, other off-app conversions. Although our first users are indie developers, most profitable apps make <$2K per month, so we’ll grow to targeting corporations like United, Starbucks.

How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize you can’t know precisely, but give your best estimate.)

The plan is a monthly subscription. We’ll offer customers help with experiment design. If we charge premium customers $1K per month and get 200 customers (less than 2 sales a week) over 2 years we’d make ~$2.4MM per year 2 years in. Artisan (launched this month) claims to charge $1K-$10K per month, so that’s possibly a better price.

Ultimately we want to be the default way people change their apps. Everyone would use Apptimize to test each idea, and then use Apptimize to deliver the change to users. 100% of apps would use our library to reduce time to propagate changes and tighten the app development cycle. We’d help erase the line between apps and the web.

If you’ve already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

We started in January, and Apptimize is currently ~8K lines of code (not including libraries, html, or css) and works end-to-end. The frontend is JS, CSS, and Angular. We’re on EC2 mainly using PostgreSQL, nginx, and Netty/Java.

How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you’re launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)?

Apptimize works and we just launched our private beta this week! We have 100+ signups but we only accepted 2 friends this week because we are working closely with our first customers to shape the future of our product.

The beta has the Android library, a website dashboard to manage experiments, and a results page showing statistics and conclusions. The WYSIWYG interface will be ready in a few weeks. Our research suggested starting with Android because Android developers rely on freemium (compared to iOS who make a lot off premium) and want to AB test to optimize in-app purchases, etc. Our iOS version is coming in a few weeks.

If you have an online demo, what’s the url?

yc.apptimize.com/admin

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won’t be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?

Our first customers are our friends’ startups. To target our next customers, we downloaded their apps and their competitors’ apps and are designing experiments for them. If they find the pre-designed experiments useful, they can easily start testing with those the instant they sign up.

We’ll offer customer referral rewards such as temporary premium memberships. We also want to make it easy to see and implement case study results by suggesting experiments to potential users. For marketing, we will ask and answer stackoverflow and Quora questions regarding how people AB test on mobile.

We could partner with companies in related fields like App Annie or Parse.

If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?

Nancy and Jeremy are committed to exclusively working on Apptimize for the next few years.

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we’ve been waiting for. Often when we fund people it’s to do something they list here and not in the main application.

EEG machine to read babies’ minds. We like playing with our Emotiv machine, know prominent MIT/Stanford researchers, and see parallels between EEG analysis and high frequency market data for financial instruments (both systems produce massive amounts of data that seem random but aren’t).

A page-less browser using crowdsourcing. It’d show logical dependencies, assumptions, relationships between ideas, and best arguments for and against each belief.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

People think it’s red, but no one knows the best button color.

From High Frequency Trading to Silicon Valley

In 2012 I was on my noncompete (a paid vacation common in trading), and everyone expected me to go back into HFT after the year was up. When I started a tech company instead, people were surprised. The common response was, “Wait, your company’s not trading related at all?”

I traded in my East Village apartment, with its ambitious but empty yard where I never got around to having barbecues, for a Palo Alto Eichler, where we had many barbecues. My Ralph Lauren and Burberry dresses were replaced by Lululemon, so at any moment I could break into a jog or a 7 minute workout. My Stella McCartney vegan bags decayed at my dad’s house while I got my first car (electric) and started rock climbing. Instead of trading scandals on Squawk Box, I followed Elon Musk on Twitter.

High frequency trading is an exotic, shadowed land within the gated world of finance, and is the strangest place you can be, except for Silicon Valley. I was entering a complex tribe with unspoken castes and rites of passage – but I am from another secret tribe, with its own inscrutable numerology and hieroglyphics.

Silicon Valley surprised me:

1) Everyone is open.

Algorithmic trading works through intense secrecy. When an interviewer tries to evaluate you, they fully expect vague responses:

“How do your models work?”
“We capture edge using signals.”
“Do you add or remove liquidity?”
“It depends.”

After a few hours, they say, “Thanks for talking with us. We love what we learned about your approach,” and they mean it. You know that they know that you know the first rule of fight club. The best trading companies never let anyone know what they do, trade, or think – an algorithm sufficiently secret is indistinguishable from magic.

In contrast, everyone in the valley is amazingly open and helpful. People email me to ask for advice or intro’s, and we’ll talk about everything. Because two companies are rarely in direct competition, and the advantage your circle gains by sharing trumps whatever you could gain by hiding, Silicon Valley has developed an amazing culture of paying it forward. Everybody’s trying to conquer the same markets, and knows roughly what the space of ideas looks like, so sharing helps everyone. Around here, it’s execution over IP.

2) Valuation math is not intuitive.

When my friend asked me to invest, I asked, “What’s your company worth, like $100K?”
“No, it’s $6M.”
“Can’t I pay 3 developers $50K to make your product in a month?”
“That’s not how it works…”

I could build Snapchat in a week, but if I did, I would not have the user base of Snapchat. Same with WhatsApp – it’s worth an enormous multiple of what the app and architecture cost to build.

3) Money != success.

In trading, life was simple: PNL was all we talked about. Increasing this number was the goal. If we saw PNL underperforming, or the money eroding from a model that used to be our bread and butter, we knew we had to step it up to survive. In startups, the metrics for success are less clear, which makes it hazier to tell the difference between success and failure. One month, a startup has Hint in the refrigerator, dogs in the halls, and Friday hot tub parties. The next month, it’s selling all its Aeron chairs on Craigslist. Did the company suddenly tank? In HFT, yes- it would mean they were making money but then suddenly lost a ton of money in a few minutes due to a bug in its software. In SV, no- it probably means someone finally realized the company had died a year ago.


Lessons from algorithmic trading that have helped me in building Apptimize:

 1) Today’s future is not yesterday’s future.

While I was in trading from May 2007 to Jan 2012, several events happened that had never happened before: the collapse of the housing market, the financial crisis, the Fed’s repeated rounds of QE, etc. How are you going to backtest that? You know you’re in a scary regime that’s never been seen, which means there’s incredible opportunity, and the models have to handle it. Stuff changes under your feet and you have to run like the red queen just to stay put. You stay up at night adapting the models, because otherwise they’ll lose money in the morning. Predicting the future correctly is the first step to success; the next is making the right bet on your predictions.

Startups are the same way. Technology changes so fast that you have to work every advantage to its limit to compete. Innovate as fast as possible, invent things others believe to be impossible, and think what others haven’t thought of yet, because you’ll be swallowed by the current the moment it catches up.

2) Accept reality.

In trading, if the market tells you you’re wrong, you listen. No matter how smart you are, you can’t argue your way to victory: the market will take your money. If you’re underperforming, sometimes it means your connections are slow, but usually it means your models suck and you need to make new ones. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to the market. All you can do is accept reality, and update your models to match.

 For startups, it’s human to invent excuses for everything. Even the most literal people suddenly get creative when confronted by unpleasant realities:

  • “Our users need our product; they’re not just doing it because they’re our friends.”

  • “We can’t show live demos, not because our demo is jury-rigged to work only on our special setup, but because we want to show a build of our SDK we haven’t released yet but will soon.”

  • “We’re going to beat the competition despite { an inferior product; an unimpressive team; a lack of funding; having no user base } because { we’ll out-execute on something else; we’re differentiated; the market is huge }.

This is not accepting reality. In order to win, you have to be honest and ruthless in admitting every weakness, because you can only correct the flaws you know you have.

3) Make your own bets.

Never believe what people say without examining it, especially if it’s about the future. People are wrong all the time. The ones who are right are too busy succeeding to tell you what to do. By the time the world knows where the market’s going, the money’s gone.

 Nobody knows exactly where the prize is, but if you have a good idea, you need to make big bets, and you need to obsess about the future – the future’s where everything happens. If you copy the people who have already done the legwork for you, you’ll always be eating their scraps. You can’t afford to follow. Ask questions. Bet your beliefs. Test your hypotheses. Rely on yourself.


There’s one thing that holds true across HFT and tech startups: it’s all about the talent. At Apptimize, our investors have often remarked we have one of the strongest teams they’ve ever seen. That lets me be confident no matter what: in trading or tech, NYC or SV, it’s about betting on the right people, and I’m all in on us.

 

 

 

Thanks to Lucas Baker for editing this and vetoing the boring post I was considering publishing instead.

Never Be Intimidated

apptimize.com/about makes me so happy!
apptimize.com/about makes me so happy!

After I introduced Lynn to my friend, she said he seemed intimidating.
“Really?! Why?”
“He’s a CS professor, the CEO of a successful startup, and is too busy to talk with anyone but you.”
“So?”
“…Maybe your power is that you’re not afraid of stuff.”

I was flattered to hear this but it’s not the whole story. I think I was never intimidated by intelligence or wealth, but once upon a time I was intimidated by physical beauty. Here’s how I realized one should never be intimidated, even by hot, rich geniuses:

I was an unkissed nerd for 16 years, then I had boyfriends for 4 years, and then I was single for years. During my senior year at MIT, which was the start of my 2nd phase of monkish devotion to knowledge, I went on 1 date. It was because he was the most beautiful human I’d ever seen in real life. The first time I saw him, he wasn’t wearing a shirt because he was ironing it. Yes, he went to Harvard. His suite mates were probably milling around- I have no idea. I remember I said, “Do you wax your chest because of swimming?” He had the grace to blush. “Mainly because I model.”

After verifying there were no pictures of him on the first Google results (his name is very ungoogleable. What were his parents thinking?), I forgot about him for a week. Then he asked me if I wanted “to hang out.” That night, I found that the shirtless pictures of him were on Facebook (this was many years ago and Facebook was not yet the first place one went to look at people).

That Friday, we walked around Harvard square. I found it hard to not stare at him, but I also evaded touch and felt anxious to be alone. Nothing happened. I can’t “date;” I’m incapable of romantic relationships that aren’t based on a monkish devotion to work. After the most awkward date this kid had ever been on, and the least awkward of the 5 dates I’d ever been on, I went back to East Campus and did a problem set while a black cat rattled my door and freshmen screamed on the thundering roller coaster in the courtyard.

I had expected the date to be really fun, but it wasn’t anything. I’d expected it to be more fun than being with a normal person because he was so much hotter than a normal person, and I realized this logic was wrong. I’m exceedingly grateful to him because it was actually the epiphany that he would ever consider dating *me* despite being so much hotter that allowed me to realize physical beauty doesn’t matter. For me, maturation has been a series of realizing what doesn’t matter.

Intelligence, beauty, and wealth used to seem like notable qualities, but now they’re commoditized by technology. Jesus and Buddha always said beauty and wealth didn’t matter, but for years I was reluctant to conclude intelligence was also irrelevant.

It was in high school that I realized I was in danger of dooming myself to unhappiness if I defined myself by my intelligence. Intelligence seems fundamentally different from beauty, right? Because it’s easier to use intelligence to create something… but it ultimately is just another commoditizable property. There will always be someone more beautiful or intelligent, and now technology elevates everyone to a high level. When headhunters were pimping me out to billionaires, “Her brain is huge and will make you a lot of money,” it was obvious intelligence has been commoditized.

A millennia ago, physical strength was actually useful and prized- the strongest dude was also the richest because he could bop you on the head and take your cow- but now physical strength is useless. Most modern men can run a marathon. One day science and technology will allow everyone will be as strong, healthy, smart, and beautiful as they wish. Technology made many crafts and skills obsolete because it commoditized fine motor skills. Technology is the great equalizer that commoditizes and equalizes everything, taking beauty, information, strength, and health, and giving it to everyone.

When you take away everything that the robots are going to do for us and allow us to be, when we’re all genius supermen, what will be left for us to identify ourselves by? If you put your identity next to beauty, you’ll feel worthless when beauty is commoditized by technology because anyone can purchase your identity. If money is an important part of your identity, you’ll bemoan the fact there’s always someone richer and scuff the wheel of your Tesla every time someone mentions Bill Gates. Instead of forming my identity in a way that allows technology to erode it, I want to form it such that technology would enhance it.

Now when I meet someone with intelligence, beauty, or wealth, which is basically everyone in the post-singularity society of Silicon Valley, I automatically delete those qualities from my perception of their Real Identity. I still recognize intelligence, etc. as a property they possess, but I don’t define them by it. I try to define people by their ambitions, creativity, drive, perspective, attitude, inspirations… that soft gushy core inside the genius billionaire playboy. Love, values, interests, goals. Not where they went to school, how good they look in Lululemon, or how many Lamborghini’s they drive, because eventually we’ll all be downloading MIT OCW straight into our brains using Matrix-style optogenetics tech, have enhanced cyborg bodies, and harvest infinite energy from asteroids so that resource constraints become a purely theoretical problem.

What do you view as the most important aspect of your identity?

How to Not Waste Your Life

Tired of your career? Lost and confused about your next move and unmotivated on your current path? You’re not alone. The only mystery intriguing to modern man is modern man himself: a terrifying labyrinth that often leads nowhere interesting.

In theory, through our every action, we’re constantly continuously deciding our private interpretations of the meaning of life. In reality, humans rely on cached thoughts to avoid decisions. You can easily go your whole life without making a deliberate, researched choice. Big decisions are painful and difficult, so we avoid them unless the default becomes more painful than the agonizing confusion of deciding. Why deviate from what you’re “supposed to do” when you’re already outperforming most humans that ever lived?

People on Quora ask, “I’m 20 or 30-something and don’t know what to do because I haven’t found my passion yet. What is my passion?” As first-world youth, we’re not responsible for anything beyond our own enjoyment, so we think we should simply find a passion and then do that forever. People who excel do seem passionate. Steve Jobs is dogmatic about design; Rowling wrote doggedly for years while waitressing. Leaders and founders are passionate. How do we be like that? What is the meaning of life!?

“Make something people want.”

That is Y Combinator’s motto, and I think that is the meaning of life. Note that it doesn’t say anything about passion. “Make something” is fundamental – people whose work doesn’t result in creation feel they’re wasting their lives. So is “people want” – if no one wants your hand-knitted cat sculptures, you’ll also feel  life is a waste. “Make something” and “people want” are two things I knew before Y Combinator. The unspoken middle is where I learned something new: “people,” as in “OTHER people.”

Most of my life was spent not thinking about other people. I’m an only child, and my primary motivation throughout the first 27 years of my life was very individualistic – I wanted to challenge myself, increase my understanding of nature, prove my own awesomeness, etc. I imagined that if I could live life wandering through a forest of libraries by day, deriving all the secrets of reality by night, I’d be satisfied.

The change came slowly, but one day, I realized that my motivations towards being the best were self absorbed. I imagined being the best trader in the world, and realized I would feel like my life had been a waste of time. I imagined being the smartest person in the world – making scientific discoveries, writing treatises on Proust; winning Nobel prizes; listening to my ex-boyfriend Ryan Gosling beg for a mold of my body so he could always remember how hot I am – and I felt nothing. Was I just not imagining it correctly? Was there some art, like chess or painting, so pure it would make me happy? My conclusion was “No.” I looked at the people who are the absolute best at what they do and, although I admire them, being them doesn’t feel like something I want.

The key to passion and having a useful, non-wasted life is to look beyond yourself. Selfishness and self-searching, what we do to “find ourselves,” hinder us from getting what we want.

Startups are about other people, and successful startups are one of the more selfless things in existence. It’s not about what you want, it’s about your users. Make something OTHER PEOPLE want, however different they are from you. Be passionate about your users, not yourself. (Even in the “startup of you”.)

I no longer think of Superposition Nancy as the main way of motivating myself. It doesn’t seem ambitious enough. I changed my reference frame from Superposition Nancy to Superposition All-Humans-Now-and-Forever. How do I act to make sure we humans collectively outperform our superposition fate? How do we change the fate of mankind? All the things I could do easily would move the needle very little for humanity at large. Money (look at the trillions of dollars the US prints and spends) is nothing compared to an invention like the light bulb, or the Internet, or the kind of thought leadership that came from Martin Luther or the founding fathers.

First I think locally, about the debt I owe to my parents who sacrificed to make my  life possible. Then I think about the debt I owe my community, for making me safe. Then I think back farther: back to the inventors of electricity, of books. I’m sure Gutenberg could have spent his days drinking and loafing instead of inventing the printing press. Because he didn’t, all of us benefit tremendously from his work in ways we can never repay. When I’m sitting at home thinking, “I should lie in bed and re-watch the Matrix and eat pizza and swipe around on Tinder,” then I think about how Gutenberg will punch me in the face in the afterlife. I want to repay some of what I owe all these people, who got off their butts and did something that elevated the rest of mankind, whose genius and labor keeps me safe and snug in bed at night. My parents could’ve raised me by leaving me alone with a TV and boxes of cereal. But they gave me the right food and taught me to be healthy; they took me to the library and taught me to learn. How do you repay something like that? You can’t, but you can try.

Everything we have is because of someone who rose above their self-absorption. I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for people who valued adding something to the world above their own comfort. So when I’m not working, I feel a crushing sense of guilt. If I’m not helping out someone else, somewhere down the line, then I’m failing. Think of the people who are long dead, and those who might never be born. Look at the people around you, and the people on the other side of the earth. Do we leave the earth as if we’d never existed, or do we leave it better?

Ironically, in startups as in life, focusing on others lets you can gain the most for yourself. You learn the most, do the most, grow the most. So if you want to be awesome and productive, join a startup. Make something other people want.

Not unrelatedly, this is exactly what we at Apptimize are doing. What we’ve shown publicly is the tip of the iceberg and we’re looking for the missing members of our band! So, we want to meet the best frontend, iOS, Android, and backend engineers you know. We’re very picky, because it’s so important that we believe in our team, and believe that together we’re going somewhere worth going. By the grace of our Robot Invader friends, our office is on the Mountain View Googleplex, our board game collection is famed throughout the industry, and our technology is not too shabby either. Our investors and users uniformly say, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” We’re excited to be on this adventure together!

So, if you want to be part of a team working on something that affects a lot of people, invents new technologies, believes innovation, science, ideas, and culture can move the needle where material wealth cannot, and are frighteningly ambitious about where we’re going, then message me at nancy at apptimize dot com.

The Apptimize team minus Dustin, who's traveling!
The Apptimize team minus Dustin, who’s traveling!
Our Dustin!
Our Dustin!

PS. If you can guess our hack house wifi password, we will fly you out for a visit, plus I will tell you the rest of the plot of HPMOR. The network is chaoslegion. Hint: What house am I?

Thanks to Lucas Baker for reading a draft of this post.