Not much has been written on Vyrros, who has remained mostly under the radar during his time at Apple, but his contributions were immeasurable, sources say. Vyrros becomes CTO at Layer, a startup we profiled back in December that hopes to let any developer add chat features to their app with only ten lines of code. Layer also provides push notification services, cloud sync, offline storage, and most other services a message app would need. These kinds of services could take several months to build from scratch. Layer hopes to offer up these services for a small fee.
Vyrros is only the latest of several tech all stars to join Layer. Jeremie Miller, the man credited with creating the XMPP (Jabber) chat language joined the company last fall, as did George Patterson, former director of operations at OpenDNS — a global infrastructure that handles 50 billion queries per day. Layer was also co-founded by Ron Palmeri, one of the guys behind Grand Central, which was acquired by Google and became Google Voice. Few people have as much experience scaling infrastructures as the people Layer has collected. Vyrros, for one, saw iMessage grow from nothing to handling billions of messages per day.
“Building that crap is hard. If you want security, scalability, low latency, bandwidth and power efficiency (and you do), it becomes brutally difficult. But also interesting and challenging and pretty darn fun. This is where Layer comes in,” Vyrros wrote in a blog post yesterday. “Layer offers something beyond all that. Because we’re not just focusing on a single application. We’re laying out a whole dang platform, something that can grow a multitude of novel apps.”
