Architect - Reclaim.ai
Intelligent calendar automation for busy professionals
https://reclaim.ai/

At Reclaim I primarily focus on engineering but do some product design for the projects I’m involved in. The work ranges from building new features to prototyping to supporting customers. So far I’ve made improvements to the core prioritization and scheduling algorithms, introduced the use of partition tables in PostgreSQL, explored the use of LLMs for specific use cases, and helped complete several projects as a leader and programmer, mostly in Java with a little TypeScript.

Explored observability startup ideas

I left Hasura to explore several product ideas for observability solutions. The premises of the explorations were:

• OpenTelemetry has reached a point of maturity that it should be central in most organizations observability strategies
• Developer attention is valuable and limited so provide a UX that is portable across backends (I believe this is possible given OpenTelemetry as a basis)
• Open source ingest, query, and storage solutions have reached a point that organizations producing significant telemetry can achieve better outcomes (developer experience, flexibility, performance, cost) than with incumbent vendors
• There is general dissatisfaction with the fragmented landscape of tools
• The prices for observability tools are too high

I built several prototypes and talked with many people about their needs as users and buyers of observability solutions. Ultimately I didn’t find a wedge into the market that I liked for a startup. The prototypes and ideas focused in these areas:

• Widely distributed storage of telemetry while maintaining great query ergonomics (rather than shipping it to a central location) (not open source)
• UI that fully embraces OpenTelemetry semantics and blends the telemetry types in useful ways (not open source)
• Yet another dashboard system, but intended to be portable for developers and vendor-neutral. A few more details are available at https://github.com/gunrein/westdash.

During this time I also built and published Wallowa as a side project using DuckDB, Rust, TypeScript. Source code is available at https://github.com/gunrein/wallowa.

I continue to build observability tools on the side.

Conservationist - Buncombe Hollow Forest
Restoring native species to suppress invasives and improve beaver habitat and fish passage in this small conservation forest.

CTO - Hasura
Open source-core startup focused on automatically creating APIs from databases
https://www.hasura.io/

At Hasura I helped clarify the product and technical strategies while I led the growth and maturation of engineering, product management, and product design into a ~100 person organization.

• Made architectural improvements in all areas of the product and services in support of improving end-user developer experience
• Push the transition to expand past the original codebase implemented in Haskell to take advantage of Rust (runtime performance) and Java (library ecosystem for database drivers)
• Hired strong leaders for engineering and product management; invested in developer experience, product quality, faster lead time and release cadence (from twice per year to every two weeks), architecture improvements, documentation team, and product analytics
• Reorganized Engineering, PM, and Design to increase connection to users, increase team satisfaction, reduce context switching, increase focus, increase ownership, and reduce lead time
• Collaborated with the executive team on business strategy, product strategy, pricing, and packaging; increased transparency through weekly, monthly, and quarterly updates
• Improved processes, tools, and documentation to foster a psychologically safe learning environment that captured knowledge regularly; DORA metrics, incident response, first formal reviews, structure and checklists for improvements, releases, and launches
• Prototyped syntax for new way to express models and relationships

Limited Partner - Oregon Venture Fund
https://oregonventurefund.com/
Participated in diligence and investment in multiple companies.

Group VP of Engineering, Group VP of Product - New Relic
Monitoring and observability solution
https://www.newrelic.com/

Progressively took on more responsibility starting in product management then moved into engineering as the company grew from ~350 to ~2200 people. The largest engineering group I was responsible for was between 140 and 150 people.

• At various times led engineering and/or product management for the APM, Infrastructure, Browser, Synthetics, Logging, Serverless, and parts of the platform (not all at once)
• Advocated for and sponsored New Relic's participation in OpenTelemetry and led the engineering group who published New Relic's proprietary agents as open source (some were source available before)
• Coached and mentored leaders; helped grow organizations and teams; fostered the culture
• Helped establish product management as a function

Director of Product - Cedexis
DNS-based adaptive global load balancer using RUM for intelligence
https://www.cedexis.com/

Responsible for product management and design for the RUM (real user monitoring) and DNS-based adaptive global load balancer products.

• Collaborated with the CEO and co-founder on product direction
• Worked closely with the VP of Engineering, engineering team, and designers on requirements and designs; programmed small parts of browser UI
• Worked with sales engineers to understand challenges and opportunities in the field
• Engaged customers around user needs, buyer needs, designs, and the roadmap

Product Manager - Jama Software
Requirements management for complex products and projects
https://www.jamasoftware.com/

A brief tenure focused on product management for the company's requirements management product.

• Organized and led the company's first CAB (customer advisory board) meeting
• Collaborated with the CEO and co-founder on product direction
• Worked closely with the VP of Engineering, engineering team, and designers on requirements and designs
• Engaged customers, sales engineers, and sales reps around user needs, buyer needs, designs, and the roadmap

Senior Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Support Engineer - Jive Software
Enterprise collaboration tools
https://www.jivesoftware.com/

Joined when the company was bootstrapped and < 10 people; grew to about ~350 people.

• Started, led, and managed the customer engineering team which was brought in when there were particularly challenging technical issues with customer deployments
• Product managed Jive's XMPP-based IM server and client as well as the flagship Clearspace product
• Established the support department as the first support engineer focused on scaling and troubleshooting the Java-based server and interfaces to various relational DBs (usually Postgres, Oracle, or DB2)