Our values

I don’t think I have ever had as much fun professionally as I have had over the last month. Building an early stage startup is beyond awesome. I get to meet with fun people all day: partners, members of the community, customers and potential employees. I get to dig into technology I love with people I respect. The future feels wide open. Super cool!

It is also a bit nerve wracking. There are a ton of things that you can get wrong as a first time CEO (or so they tell me :) ). Some degree of mistakes are inevitable, and by carefully listening you should be able to correct before they hurt you or your customers. And some level of risk taking is essential else you will never change the world. There are however some things you really need to get right first time. None stand out more clearly in stories I hear from other successful and not successful entrepreneurs than getting your culture right from the start.

With that in mind I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about the environment that Joe and I hope to create at Heptio. We hope that this will outline to prospective customers, partners and employees how we think about the world. It seems like the right place to start is our values.

1. Honest technology. As I look back on what Joe and I have built together, one thing has consistently stood out: we are committed to building honest technology. No attribute exemplifies this more than predictability: infrastructure technology must be boring; you just shouldn’t have to think about it. Security, reliability, and consistency should all be baked in. Engineers should be focused on helping the business. As Joe loves to say, ‘it should function exactly as it says on the box’. Everything else must fade into the background. The second attribute that we believe exemplifies this is value. We are working in the open with an open source community and, at the end of the day, are building a company that profits from the contributions of others. We can take no more value from the community than we put back into through contribution, support and new ideas.
2. Diversity. We see two highly complementary sides to the same coin with diversity. The first is a social component. We struggle with the fact that the technology field has become so intrinsically lacking in human diversity. Joe and I take as much personal satisfaction in helping people grow and we do in building technology, we plan to dedicate a significant portion of our time and energy to building up our team. With that in mind that helping women and other underrepresented minorities in tech prosper is smart and socially wise. We also believe in a more self-serving facet of diversity, diverse teams are more powerful. The most successful teams I have worked on haven’t been staffed by people that are essentially the same. They are staffed by people who all have unique and complementary superpowers. A team should be more capable than the sum of the parts. This is a sort of the ‘justice league’ perspective on team building; or ‘moneyball’ if you aren’t a comics type of person :). We aim to build Heptio on a truly diverse employee base from day 1 and recognize this is going to require active work and an ongoing commitment.
3. Transparency and kind directness. We are engineers, and it is pretty clear that in control systems clear signals drive efficiency. The same applies to the world we live in. As a professional, given better information you act more intelligently, are more responsive and make better decisions. This applies to us in every area: with customers, with partners and with our employees. One of the most powerful things about the Kubernetes community is that all design is done in the open. This reduces surprises and drives community health as everyone knows what is coming and can participate in defining it. Transparency, honesty and openness are, therefore, key to our identity. But we are also human. The environment we work in needs to be tempered with compassion. To ensure that Heptio is a healthy environment we embrace the idea of kind directness. Openness and transparency in interpersonal settings must be tempered with compassion. It is important to be direct, but only when motivated by the desire to improve the wellbeing of everyone. We love the SRE ‘blameless post-mortem’ as a good example of this in action.
4. Unconventional. Through our time together, Joe and I (and others in our ‘squad’ at Google) have consistently challenged conventional wisdom and held-to unconventional ideas. We consistently (and often to our managers chagrin :) ) challenged the status quo; both technically and on the business side of the house. Google Compute Engine was not a revolutionary product at face value, but nevertheless challenged Google’s views on how to approach cloud. It also introduced a raft of new technologies into Google itself. Kubernetes challenged the established views on how to approach creating and delivering a cloud service, and challenged the view that around positioning and management of containers and their operations. Within Google, Kubernetes challenged Google to engage with the wider community in a truly open way. We aim to continue this trend and I don’t think Heptio will be quite like any other company out there. We believe that the world has changed significantly in the last few years. Cloud has redefined how businesses think about acquiring IT technology. Enterprise’s relationship with technology is evolving and it is becoming more and more central to the modern business’ identity. We believe that walking directly in the paths of previous success won’t lead to the best outcome. We aim to be a new class of enterprise product company. We will try something different, but will stay within the boundaries of building honest technology, fostering diversity and being open, transparent and direct with our customers, partners and ourselves.

This list is far from complete and will grow as we grow. It will become more nuanced as we do. We would love to hear what you think. Drop us a note on via inquiries@heptio.com or twitter (@heptio) sharing your thoughts.

We are also hiring! If you’d like to join us in this journey, send mail to jobs@heptio.com.

Thanks!

— craig (and Joe)