Career trajectory

The last ten years of my career are an example of how linear progression is a myth.

In 2009, I left NetApp in a huff. My attempts to redirect our investment strategy to either pursuing aggressive investments in replication or what later on became known as HCI went nowhere. Worse, for me, NetApp was more interested in what was known as convergence and later on became known as 8.0, and I wasn’t interested in that effort.

And so I left NetApp.

And I went to Zynga. Zynga was an incredible experience. The first startup, first pre-IPO, first IPO, cloud, on-prem, hybrid.

And for the first three years, I was flying on top of the world. I remember feeling that I had finally arrived!

Then Facebook changed its algorithms, did Libra 1.0 (aka Facebook credits), and Zynga fell, And we failed to deliver on mobile games. And I went from speaking to hundreds of analysts, building cool games, to being out. In less than 12 months, I went from the top of the world, to out.

So I looked for a job and took one at Juniper. And that was a professional experience that was surreal. In short, I joined to help transform the culture and got laid-off in 14 months.

And then, I ended up at VMware. By then, I had gone from a high-flying senior architect to joining VMware at a time when VMware was not that cool.

And the team I joined had just endured a lay-off, a re-org, and after I joined, the attrition was high.

I like to describe our situation in the following way. We were a team in a dark freezing room. Inside the room were a few pieces of dry lumber. And we had two matches. With the first match, we found the wood, and with the second, we lit it. We were great, and we were lucky.

The gap between success and failure of 6.5 was minimal. We had managed to assemble the right kind of team that could pull it off, but we didn’t know it at the time.

And then, after we worked to figure out our k8s strategy, we got lucky again.

The Heptio team decided to join VMware. And thanks to their decisive contribution, what was an excellent k8s technology strategy, became a tremendous k8s strategy.

The wheel has turned, and I gave a keynote at k8s about the work my team did. And the first time I did my talk at Zynga, I thought that this is why it must be because I am that good. And now, nearly seven years later, I realize that I wasn’t that good. I was lucky.