From Berkeley to Barcelona to Berlin and Beyond: a Personal Journey

Five years ago, I was fortunate to be leading the team within Metaswitch that launched Project Calico, a revolutionary approach to network virtualization. Not long after, we founded Tigera as a stand-alone startup focused on commercializing Calico and addressing the network security challenges introduced by cloud native architectures.

They say one year is seven dog years. There’s probably a similar ratio when it comes to Silicon Valley Startup Years. I certainly feel like I have learned a couple of decades of lessons as founding CEO and more recently VP Business Development at Tigera. How to balance supporting an open source community and building a commercially successful business; recruit a world class executive team; maintain a relentless focus on execution; foster an ecosystem of mutually beneficial partnerships; and ultimately the immense satisfaction in seeing something you incubated from the germ of an idea to a de facto industry standard adopted practically across the board by all the major cloud providers, vendors, and major enterprise users.

So it probably comes as a surprise to many that I would consider leaving Tigera at this point in its journey. The fact is that I have also gained some wisdom over the past few years, such as: family comes first; there are dreams we have which are more important than pursuing a singular company vision; and building a deep executive bench inevitably means no one individual (including any one founder) is as critical to the company as they were in the beginning.

For a long time, my wife, two children and I have lived in Berkeley, California, but wanted to live for an extended period in Europe — Germany specifically, as our children grew up bi-culturally (my wife is German, and our kids attended German school through 8th grade) but have only ever lived in the US. As we realized our eldest would be graduating high school in 2020, if we wanted to undertake any adventure before they left for college, it would have to be now. With Tigera well established but still small enough to have its exec team based in San Francisco and focused on North America, pursuing this dream would mean moving into a very different role — and as I really enjoy the early stages of company building I decided this would be the time to make a move and jump right into the exciting Berlin tech startup scene.

And so, after a couple of trips to Berlin, we have found places at two excellent high schools there, and I am starting the next phase of my career with the amazing team at Kinvolk.

For those who don’t know Kinvolk, they are one of the most kick-ass engineering teams I know in the cloud native software space. They have deep Linux kernel expertise, but also understand the full application runtime stack including Kubernetes, container runtimes, networking, service mesh, visibility, operations, etc., and are world class security gurus to boot. They were the developers who worked with CoreOS on the rkt container runtime, the folks that extended Weave Scope with BPF support, and the security experts who discovered several security issues in Kubernetes and related projects. They have assisted some of the biggest names in the industry with hard-core systems engineering and penetration testing. And they are great community supporters, organizing meetups and conferences including All Systems Go! and Cloud Native Rejekts (debuting this weekend in Barcelona).

In short, if they’re not already, Kinvolk should be on your radar.

I’ll be joining the team with responsibility for business development, and also bringing additional leadership to the Berlin office while Chris Kuehl, the CEO, moves to Boulder, Colorado to establish a US subsidiary. We have some exciting plans, all built around the core principles of pushing the envelope with leading-edge Linux technologies, a uniquely strong focus on security, and embracing community and open source as the only viable way to achieve that objective.

You can see the first steps in this strategy with the announcement of Lokomotive, Kinvolk’s cutting-edge distribution of Kubernetes. Inspired by CoreOS Tectonic, Lokomotive serves both as a great product in its own right as well as a platform for the development of a suite of complementary tools building on the powerful capabilities in latest Linux kernels. And, talking of Linux, Kinvolk is one of the few Kubernetes companies to also maintain its own container-optimized operating system with Flatcar Linux, originally a fork of CoreOS Container Linux but now very much its own thing with a growing and enthusiastic user base.

Watch out for more updates from me and Kinvolk as I get up to speed, and we start to apply the incredible expertise and talent in the team to some of the hardest problems we see customers facing today as they adopt Kubernetes.

See you at KubeCon in Barcelona, and in Berlin after that!