How tech startup DASH scaled its offerings by more than 300% with Google
About DASH
DASH is the tech accelerator of The Works: home to successful international work-brands like YoungCapital, YoungCapital NEXT, Studentjob, and Jobbird.com. It’s eight specialized, international, development teams are focussed on creating an interconnected and ever expanding worktech universe. Shaped by an immense database, a vast network of online platforms, smart new apps, and promising technology.
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Contact usWhen technology accelerator DASH saw rapidly growing demand, it moved to Google Cloud. Together, Google and Dash formulated a powerful infrastructure that enabled quick scaling and a smoother, more cost-effective innovation process.
Google Cloud results
- Went from $203 million in revenue to $603 million after moving to Google
- Running more than three times the applications in production after hosting with GKE
- Improved overall security and resilience of the platform
Growing 300% with Google solutions
Based in The Netherlands, DASH is on a mission to revolutionize job boards and platforms. A subsidiary of The Works, which also houses YoungCapital, Jobbird, and StudentJob–an international group of brands that aims to help all people find work–DASH develops products and platforms that match job seekers with employers more efficiently through Artificial Intelligence. Dash also has a payment feature that expedites payroll. In short, it serves as a singular hub for finding work, getting to work, and getting paid.
DASH proved so effective when it first launched in 2015 that the startup saw a rapid rise in demand, but the limitations of its cloud provider were holding it back from expanding its features and serving more clients. The company's monolithic IT structure was getting bigger, servers became expensive to maintain, and its new financial services product required far more data processing and storage than DASH's infrastructure could handle. Launching new applications with high overhead made deploying and scaling individual parts of its stack a challenge, diverting time and budget from moving the business forward.
With plans for international expansion, the DASH team decided to switch cloud providers in the hopes of accommodating growth and adding to the platform’s functionality—while keeping costs flat. Since its parent company The Works had found success using Google Cloud tools, the DASH team transitioned from self-hosted email to Google Workspace and then to Google Cloud, restructuring to a microservices-based architecture.
Learning how to future-proof the new environment in deep-dive workshops
DASH wanted to host its workloads using docker containers on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a shift from the company's virtual machine model. With Kubernetes, DASH could deploy into the cluster to facilitate the self-service model the company wanted to offer its users. And because Kubernetes auto-scales, the team had more options in terms of certificates and load balancers--without the need for setup from the operations team.
DASH wanted to ensure that its new environment would be future-proof. So, the startup participated in eight half-day workshops with Google, getting a deep dive on Google products, guidance on how to modernize its application stack, and tips for migration to Google Cloud.
In addition to helping the team plan a modern and scalable infrastructure, the Google workshops also showed DASH how to improve its environment over time.
"We have made a lot of changes since we started using Google Cloud in terms of best practices," said Karst Hammer, a software architect at DASH. "The workshops gave a big overview of all the new functionality that was there but also showed us how to make improvements. We learned to connect our database over IPs for better security, and we set up our Kubernetes cluster so Google runs automatic upgrades for improved resilience."
Building a scale-ready infrastructure
After it began hosting most of its applications on GKE, the DASH team brought in Firebase for its small static sites, as well as for the mobile app analytics and push notification features that Firebase offers.
"Firebase was quick and easy to get started for our small project. For example, a single page that displays metrics about the number of candidate profiles we have in our database didn't require us to do any set up or maintain infrastructure," Hammer said. "We just create a project, upload the files we want to host, and point to a domain name." From there, DASH can delegate permissions to relevant developer teams.
The data team chose Cloud SQL to host its MySQL databases, and uses BigQuery to extract data from all of the systems DASH & The Works uses. It can pull from the company's products running on Cloud SQL, as well as its third-party SaaS system for information like payroll data. To more effectively filter the data, DASH leverages Looker Studio and other data processing tools that Google provides.
"In the past we used a bunch of different tools to get that process done, and now we can just dump some data into BigQuery, and even read it directly from the databases using the federated queries," Hammer said.
Growing 300% with Google solutions
Since moving to Google Cloud, DASH has gone from running 20 applications on its previous cloud platform to running 70 applications in production on GKE—and the team has been able to keep costs flat. In the first four years since it has moved to Google Cloud, The Works has gone from $203 million in revenue to $603 million.
"We have been able to focus on building software that makes a difference," Hammer said. "Google has a lot of good tools that provide things like high availability and automatic backups, so we spend less time on maintaining the infrastructure. The fact that it's all out of the box, and that we can benefit from all the expertise Google has, allows us to do things as a small operations team that we couldn't have done otherwise."
While the company has grown significantly, its operations teams have done so only slightly, which has helped DASH avoid the effect of talent shortages.
"We have been able to focus on building software that makes a difference. Google has a lot of good tools that provide things like high availability and automatic backups, so we spend less time on maintaining the infrastructure."
—Karst Hammer, Software Developer at DASHInnovating its product with security
Developers rely on Cloud Monitoring from Google for performance monitoring, which only requires them to click on the log files instead of having somebody log into a server and retrieve log files for them.
"We have fewer people working on the matching and payment process, which means we can scale better with smaller operations," said Jenneke Wijma, managing director at DASH.
With time saved on management tasks and its focus shifted to innovation, DASH has expanded the number of job seekers it serves and is onboarding an annual average of 2,500 new employees internally, In 2021, DASH onboarded more than 1,700 new businesses and 55,000 temp workers to its platform each year.
DASH has managed to innovate on its product while meeting ambitious growth targets. The platform's matching algorithm relies heavily on ElasticSearch, which the team is now moving to the cloud thanks to a partnership between Google and Elastic. And, the startup has turned to Google tools to improve the algorithm using machine learning techniques.
"The Works will become more of a platform company, and therefore scalable hosting is crucial to DASH," Wijma said. "Paired with our focus on the internationalization of our products, the cloud is an important part of that strategy."
DASH has also improved its security posture. A container-optimized operating system running on GKE has reduced the platform's attack surface and the blast radius, making it more secure than when it was relying on virtual machines. By leveraging Google's container analysis and vulnerability scanning, the team doesn't have to devote manual labor to detecting common vulnerabilities and exposures.
"From the technical side, it's easy to ask Google a couple of questions about what a product can do before we start using it and find out if it supports our use case or not," Wijma said. "We can quickly get insight to our roadmap and understand when we can start integrating something new, which fits our culture of fast iteration and rapid communication."
"We have fewer people working on the matching and payment process, which means we can scale better with smaller operations."
—Jenneke Wijma, Managing Director at DASHExpanding offices while reducing emissions
The Netherlands has been a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, and DASH is no exception. As the company grows its international presence, it is purposely seeking out partners with similar goals—a standard that the company says Google meets.
"We believe we need to leave the world a better place for young people entering and workforce right now. Our ISO 14001 certified environmental management system also means we hold our suppliers to high standards as well," Wijma said.
Google Cloud is carbon neutral but has committed to running all of its data centers exclusively on carbon-free energy by 2030. Google's recent release of Carbon Footprint, a tool that lets customers measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions, supports DASH in making sure they're working toward greener business practices in a quantifiable way.
"The way Google focuses on climate goals compared to other cloud providers fits the standard that we set for our suppliers," Wijma said, "Google is far ahead of our previous cloud provider on bringing down emissions."
"Google is far ahead of our previous cloud provider on bringing down emissions."
—Jenneke Wijma, Managing Director at DASHTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About DASH
DASH is the tech accelerator of The Works: home to successful international work-brands like YoungCapital, YoungCapital NEXT, Studentjob, and Jobbird.com. It’s eight specialized, international, development teams are focussed on creating an interconnected and ever expanding worktech universe. Shaped by an immense database, a vast network of online platforms, smart new apps, and promising technology.