I joined Google in 2018 as a Senior Developer Advocate. Over the past 4 years I founded developer relations for a new product area, was promoted to Staff Developer Relations Engineer, and built a team from scratch.
I’ve been a poster boy of Googleyness, referring and recruiting friends, speaking at colleges about my journey to Google, acting as an internal mentor, and participating as a highly active interviewer.
With a second promotion just around the corner and a growing team, I decided to leave all the massages, free lunches, and amazing teammates behind to join a little known startup called Skyflow.
This article goes into why I made this decision and why I’m so excited for the future.
Why leave Google?
When I joined Google, I had just stepped away from running my own startup for 7 years. My company never really got out of the early stage phase. We had been under resourced for years. It felt like we had been crawling through the mud on our bellies, trying to scrap it out and make it work. We did eventually reach a major milestone by becoming cashflow positive. However, we were never going to become the rocket ship we had hoped for. I was feeling burned out on early stage and was ready for something new.
When Google approached me about a developer relations role, I was really excited about a role that would let me combine a breadth of skills beyond just coding. Additionally, I wanted to see what it was like to work at a really big company. I wanted to work with talented people that I could learn from. Finally, I was excited to get paid market value for the first time in my life :-).
However, I knew when I joined that at some point, I’d return to startup life. The pull to build something from nothing was too strong for me. I also felt like I had unfinished business in the startup world. I had failed to accomplish my goal as a startup founder and I couldn’t let it go.
Originally, I thought this point would come further down the road and that it would be me starting a company again, but sometimes life doesn’t work out exactly as you’ve drawn it on a whiteboard. Sometimes an opportunity comes along that’s too enticing to turn down.
Enter Skyflow.
What’s special about Skyflow?
Before jumping too deep into why I couldn’t turn down Skyflow, let’s first address the question of what is Skyflow?
Skyflow is a data privacy vault delivered as an API.
This means that instead of companies storing sensitive user PII, PCI, and PHI in their databases, they use Skyflow to store this information in a specially designed database delivering security, compliance, and governance accessible via an API. With Skyflow, companies don’t need to dedicate precious engineering resources to build out complicated solutions to be compliant with regulatory requirements like GDPR, PCI, or HIPPA. Additionally, companies don’t need to take on the liability of housing, managing, and securing all their user’s PII. No company wants to end up in the news, victim of the latest data breach headline. Skyflow solves this problem.
Big problem and big vision
Privacy and security is a complicated space to wrap your head around. Even a well intentioned company with a desire to address privacy and security from the start may lack in-house resources and expertise to do so. I know enough about this space and the rules and regulations around compliance that as an engineer with 20+ years of experience, I wouldn’t want to try to solve this myself.
Just like if I was building an app that accepts payments, I don’t want to have to build payment and credit card support from scratch. Or, if I need to programmatically send an SMS, I don’t want to figure out SMS specification and make a deal with a carrier to send SMS traffic.
I recognized that Skyflow fulfills a similar business and engineering need. Just as Stripe became synonymous with programmatic payments and Twilio for communication, Skyflow could be that for privacy.
People don’t get into engineering to deal with PCI and GDPR compliance, they want to build cool things that people will use. Skyflow helps developers focus on building cool things and not worry about how to securely store PII.
But many technology companies start the same way. They create a “users” table where they stick a bunch of user PII. At this stage of their company’s life, they aren’t concerned about compliance and security because they’re just trying to get their business going. As that company becomes more successful, the potential liability and risk of an “oh shit” moment only compounds. However, by this point, they likely have PII copied across multiple databases and have lost track of all the places the data is used, making it a huge resource lift to fix.
The size and scale of data impacts a company’s ability to deal with privacy. Investment in security and privacy often happens after a growth phase. Companies continually defer prioritizing this problem because there’s other features and issues that need to be addressed that are more directly connected to revenue, company growth, and the next fundraising milestone.
Skyflow is a simple solution to this problem. It’s a product universally applicable to every company storing user data and that is very exciting.
A big challenge
Skyflow is solving an important problem and it’s doing it by proposing a new way of thinking about how to treat and manage private data. Instead of treating PII like every other piece of data, it should instead be isolated and managed differently. It must be secured in a zero trust data privacy vault. The vault architecture isolates and protects sensitive data, while keeping it usable.
The data privacy vault served as an API is a new idea, a new category of product. A new category represents a big challenge. We need to educate a market about this new category. We need to help developers understand how to build with data privacy in mind from the start of the product lifecycle and why a data privacy vault is the correct architectural design.
For me, someone who loves computer science, solving problems, serving as an educator and advocate, as well as being an ex-founder, I couldn’t pass up a challenge like this.
Timing is now
Beyond the size of the problem, opportunity, and exciting challenge, the timing for a product like this feels right. There’s nearly a weekly headline about the latest data breach from a major company. The public is less tolerable and more concerned about why a company needs their private information. The wild west days of data privacy is coming to an end.
Additionally, there’s more and more regulations being put in place by governments. This is forcing companies to do a better job managing people’s personal information. There’s growing consumer and governmental pressure and ultimately, it’s just the right thing to do. People shouldn’t have to give up their privacy to use a product, a customer support agent shouldn’t need to have access to all my personal data just to help me fix my Internet, and companies with limited resources and expertise shouldn’t have to own the responsibility of securely storing user data. They should rely on experts to take care of that for them.
Incredible leadership team
Over 10 years ago, a former VP of Product at Salesforce invested in a company I started. Back then, we were just a couple of snot nosed kids with a website. Despite our modest beginnings, somehow that man believed in our vision and mission. My company didn’t quite materialize the way we had hoped, but the same man that made that early investment, Anshu Sharma, went on to become the CEO and founder of Skyflow.
Anshu has founded multiple companies, been a successful investor, and been an executive at major companies like Salesforce and Oracle. Across the board, the VP of Engineering, CPO, and CMO have an incredible work history in leadership roles at major corporations like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Apple and an amazing track record of success.
When people of this pedigree come to you with a potential opportunity, you gotta at least entertain it. There are tons of quotes about how you become those you surround yourself with but I like this one from Jim Rohn, “You become like the five people you spend the most time with. Choose carefully.“
For me, when I evaluate a career opportunity, I’m trying to optimize for the people and what I might be able to learn. I think about, are these people I want to spend my time with? Do they have something to teach me? Are they people I want to be like?
Skyflow ticked all those boxes. The exec-level aren’t just incredibly accomplished individuals, but they are also nice people. People that I wouldn’t mind modeling my career after.
Strategically important role
As anyone that has been in a leadership role for developer relations will tell you, developer relations can’t work unless there’s executive leadership sponsorship and a core belief in its’ value. Otherwise, the developer relations lead spends the majority of their time explaining and justifying their existence. They are under resourced and under valued.
Similar to companies like Stripe, Algolia, and Twilio, Skyflow is very much a built by developers for developers type of product. Developer relations and developer marketing are key strategic investments for the company that will directly impact business growth. Developer experience isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a must have.
This was very important for me.
Despite Google having tons of bets, including many developer-facing products, it’s still very much a consumer-focused company. I never felt that developer relations was considered a strategically important investment, certainly not to the same level as core engineering and product. As someone who co-lead a company where I was heavily involved in every major decision, I have hard time being in a position where my strategic impact feels limited.
Google treats its’ employees very well, but it’s still a huge company and like any huge company there are downsides. For example, the impact a sole individual has is generally limited regardless of function. Despite the success I’ve had within the product area that I worked in, if I hadn’t started at Google 4 years ago, Google would still be worth $2 trillion dollars today.
Accepting this tradeoff is totally fine and makes sense for some people, but my itch to have company-level impact and a desire to have agency to do the right things is too great. I wouldn’t be personally satisfied when I look back at my career if I didn’t take this chance with Skyflow.
Final thoughts
Google’s been a wonderful experience. I’ve met and worked with a ton of super talented fun people that I hope to stay in touch with. However, I’m over the moon excited for this next chapter with Skyflow.
We have big dreams and big plans and if you want to be part of it, we’re hiring :-). If you’re interested in a developer relations role, please contact me directly.
