Vern

Today we're releasing Data Residency 🌏 Vern now stores data and runs code in the same region as your customers. Too many vibe-coded tools quietly ignore region compliance, exposing companies to breaches, penalties, and eroded trust when migrating new customer data. Check the box from day one - available now across all tiers.

I've spent the last 2 weeks in SF sussing out if I should move our startup Vern here from Sydney. I'm still without a clear answer, but with a clearer tradeoff. The good: Ambition is assumed, people don’t hedge when they talk about what they’re building, the market is massive. I had more useful, unexpected conversations in a few days than I would normally have. The “manufactured serendipity” Paul Graham talks about is real. The bad: There’s a lot of noise around AI, and it’s increasingly difficult to discern who’s building valuable things. The homelessness and cost of living is also non-trivial. It doesn’t feel like an obvious upgrade yet. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about the announced 47% CGT in Australia. If things work, I keep less of the upside. Most of what I’m doing only makes sense because of that upside. Without it, the math tightens. On their own, neither of these things change my decision. A week in SF isn’t enough to move, and a tax change isn’t enough to leave. It feels marginally easier to justify being here, and marginally harder to justify staying.

I reckon the best growth hack right now is incentivizing migration. Every time a leader stumbles, like OpenAI’s DoW controversy, Cloudflare's ongoing outages, etc. a competitor swoops in with "switch to us in 5 minutes." Vercel and Claude did it recently. And it works because it makes leaving look incredibly easy. Most enterprise software has sticky retention not because it's great, but because migrating is painful. Customer data is messy, nested, high-volume, semantically different, full of edge cases that break every import tool. And the stakes are getting higher. Migrating historical data is now table stakes for systems of record to become systems of *intelligence*. A half-migrated CRM isn't smart- it's blind to how the business truly operates. At Vern, we believe in a future of one-click migrations for all businesses.

Keen to announce Vern is now ISO 27001 certified 🔐 We’ve officially achieved ISO 27001, following an independent third-party audit, with support from Ciphrix. For customers trusting Vern with sensitive data migrations, this formalises what we’ve built from day one: security, controls, and risk management as first-class concerns. Big thanks to Roupen for driving this and Anish / Ashish who helped us get this over the line.