Life after Google

In my six years at Google I had the privilege of working with some of the smartest people out there to build some really neat products. I also got to have a lot of fun participating and building community outside of Google. Helping to conceive and launch Google Compute Engine, Google Container Engine, Google Deployment Manager, helping the community gel around CNCF, getting to know the amazing guys at Apigee, and having a front row seat to watch the Kubernetes community unfold have all provided an incredible set of professional experiences. It was so much fun, it is hard to believe they paid me to do it. :)

Beyond my personal journey, it has also been fascinating to watch the emergence of the Cloud product group within Google. There is little doubt in my mind that Urs and the technical infrastructure team has built is the most interesting and sophisticated machines the world has seen. The team has transformed from serving Google to becoming a legitimate product organization. At the highest levels, Google itself (actually Alphabet) has become aware of the unprecedented opportunity cloud represents. Sundar’s shout out during the earning’s call (https://youtu.be/xPvUegxXk8A?t=32m4s) was another really neat moment.

So why would I possibly leave, just as things are getting interesting?

I want to do a startup. I love those early product moments where everyone thinks you are crazy, and you get to prove them wrong. I want to get my hands dirty, and help enterprise IT make the most of the emerging technologies and operations models that cloud native offers. I also miss working with Joe Beda, my co-conspirator on Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine.

Speaking personally the most formative year of my career wasn’t working at Google. It was managing departmental IT systems at at financial services company. Building Kubernetes and Compute Engine was challenging, but running IT systems and balancing keeping the lights on and keeping pace with the business was spectacularly hard. I aim to help the IT professional I used to be get more out of technology.