I am honored and humbled that today I have joined DigitalOcean as its Chief Product Officer. I am excited to lead DigitalOcean’s team to the next phase of our product growth while supporting the developers around the globe who rely on DigitalOcean to grow their businesses.
I come to DigitalOcean having served as the Vice President of the Azure Developer Experience group, and am passionate about open source communities in the cloud native space. I was an early contributor to the Docker and Kubernetes projects, and served on the board of directors of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) during its founding years. I am also a 2-time entrepreneur. After Microsoft acquired Deis in 2017, I helped lead the team that took Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from zero to the fastest growing service in the history of Azure.
Since my days as a startup leader, I have cared deeply about empowering the next generation of developers —small teams, small businesses — and I believe I can have the biggest impact on those developers as the Chief Product Officer at DigitalOcean.
If you have worked inside a big cloud company, you have witnessed the obsession with enterprise customers. It makes sense. Enterprises around the world are trying to undergo a digital transformation to become more competitive. The stakes are high, so they’re willing to pay handsomely for help. In the name of enterprise revenue, the big cloud vendors push more and more product investment and leadership attention toward their enterprise customers. This invariably comes at the expense of developers and small businesses, who don’t qualify as “top accounts”. It’s an established pattern that is not changing any time soon.
What is changing is that across the globe, there is an explosion of developers working on new digital products — small teams and small businesses — who started their journey as natives of the modern digital world. To succeed, these developers need access to a sophisticated cloud provider with a full spectrum of managed services including compute, networking, storage, databases, and more. Those services need to be wrapped in a developer experience that is carefully designed, and doesn’t feel like a collection of vendors sharing a food court. But most of all, developers need a cloud partner that is 100% focused on their success.
Ten years ago, DigitalOcean was founded to serve the next generation of developers. Long after they pioneered high-performance, SSD VMs, DigitalOcean continues to deliver the best VM experience on the market. They continue to champion the developer community, crafting some of the highest-quality educational content on the Internet. And they are renowned for their focus on design, usability, and developer-first experiences. After using DigitalOcean’s Kubernetes-based App Platform, I was blown away by the quality of the developer experience, and the technical underpinnings that make it possible. After spending many hours with Yancey and the DigitalOcean executive team, it’s clear everyone in leadership shares these values, and also brings the impressive leadership muscle and proven track records needed to execute on their vision.
If you’re a developer building a new website, developing a new API, or running a cloud-native software business, DigitalOcean is the cloud for you. Simpler experiences, simpler pricing, and a simpler way to innovate.
Stay tuned. Our journey has just begun.
