fast, faster, Fastly

March 10, 2014 10:56 am | 16 Comments

Today I join Fastly as Chief Performance Officer. Read more in Fastly’s announcement.

I’m excited to get back to the world of startups. People who have known me for less than 15 years don’t know that side of me. In my early career I worked at Advanced Decision Systems, Helix Systems (co-founder), General Magic, WhoWhere?, and CoolSync (co-founder) – companies that ranged from 3 to 300 employees.

I went to Yahoo! with the intention of staying for a few years to have some good healthcare. I loved it so much I stayed for eight years working with people like Doug Crockford, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicholas Zakas, Nicole Sullivan, Tenni Thuerer, and Philip Tellis and many more incredible developers. It was there that Ash Patel and Geoff Ralston asked me to start a team focused on performance. As visionary executives, they believed there was a set of performance best practices that would be applicable to all the Yahoo! properties. It turned out those best practices apply to nearly every site on the Web.

Knowing Google’s culture of performance I was excited to continue my work there over the past six years. Google is an amazing company. I want to loudly thank Yahoo! and Google for giving me the opportunity to focus on web performance. They are responsible for sharing this web performance research, tools, and code with the web community. It’s important that we have companies like these to move the Web forward.

Many of Google’s performance projects, such as Chrome, SPDY, WebP, and Public DNS, focus on improving the Web’s infrastructure. These infrastructure projects have a dramatic impact – they help raise the tide for all websites. That’s half of the equation. The other half lies with how websites are built. Even on this fast infrastructure it’s still possible to build a slow website.

That’s why I’m excited to join Fastly where I’ll be able to engage with Fastly’s customers to produce websites that are blazingly fast. Fastly’s CDN platform is built with latest generation technology and software. I hope to add more performance to an already fast network, and make it go even fastlier.