My next journey, ScaleFT

I’m excited to announce that I’m co-founding a startup: ScaleFT

• Datacenter Knowledge: ScaleFT Wants To Help Ops Teams Tackle Complexity Of Running On Public Clouds
• Fortune: Rackspace-backed startup seeks to boost security across clouds
• TechCrunch: ScaleFT Wants To Make Managing Public Clouds Safer, Raises $800K Seed Round
• VentureBeat: ScaleFT launches with $800K from Cloudkick founders and Rackspace

Reflection

In the last 6 and half years, I’ve seen so much: From a rag tag startup, to being acquired, to building products at a publicly traded company. I was also lucky enough to encounter my wife Kristy through this process. I have no regrets about it. This was one of those good runs, a run of time through which I met many interesting people who will forever shape my life.

But the time has come: To branch out, to explore, to define something as my own — and that is why I’m excited, to create, to push, to learn, to be a founder.

I find it amusing that Cloudkick’s original mission was to make Sysadmin’s lives better: Cloudkick started, with the basics, like visualizing your servers and monitoring. Cloudkick was acquired before we got much further. I look at CoreOS as a continuation, iterating on what it means to be an operating systems. ScaleFT has the same basic domain, with this tilt: How can we iterate on how a team of humans operates a software system.

For example, I see often actions taken in production are reported via an email after the fact — “Hey I just change X on the load balancer” in an email to the team. This is a common experience for operations teams. I think we can do better. I think we can make the actions a person takes in production reflected in many places, instantly, accurately, and in a way that augments teams to the achieve their fullest potential.

I’ve personally lived in the space between operations and software development. I want to make this a better world, an efficient world, a safe world — so that is why I’m creating ScaleFT — to push the boundaries, to create a company dedicated to this, to iterating on what production operations itself means.