My journey before Grafana Labs

I recently had a career conversation with my manager where we discussed my journey and he asked me "Who was Goutham before Grafana?". This question stuck with me and I've been getting flashes of my college life ever since. I like to think I had an interesting, non-typical college experience that shaped me a lot. This one is more or less about the professional parts. I have a ton of personal stories too that I will share in another post, maybe.

Needless to say, Goutham before Grafana was an idiot. Well, I still am an idiot, but a little less so 🙂.

Before IIT Hyderabad

It all started with Steve Jobs' death. I had never heard of him, or even Apple. But when Jobs died, the local Telugu newspaper dedicated the entire front page and full middle pages to him. There was a huge full-body photo of him. I was intrigued. Who the hell is this white guy? And why does Eenadu (the newspaper) care so much? When I heard his biography was published, I asked my dad to get me one.

And he did! It cost him 650 Rs, which was a lot of money in 2011, but I am very glad he did. I read it cover to cover twice in a span of a few days. I was a very impressionable 14 year old and I became a super fan of Steve Jobs. I knew I was going to start a startup and change the world. I didn't think college was important. I wanted to be an asshole to others, because Steve Jobs was an asshole. I watched a lot of his videos on Youtube, sometimes on repeat. I was obsessed. About 6 months later, I graduated from highschool and one of my friends sneaked in an iPhone on the last day. It was the first iPhone I saw and I cried when I held it.

I started reading a lot of management and leadership books. I picked up all kinds of interesting stories and shared them with my friends. Sometimes it worked for the best, sometimes not. One day my school called for an ad-hoc parent teacher meeting, and when my mom arrived, they told her "We did this mainly to talk to you. Someone didn't finish their homework and when asked why, answered, Goutham told us that schooling is not very important and backed it up with all these stories. So now I am not very interested." Some poor guy didn't do his homework and decided to throw me under the bus as an excuse. Needless to say, my mom wasn't thrilled. But I did inspire at least one other person with my ideas and he went on to found a company, a venture fund and is now running and scaling a pastry and cake business in Chennai. I am proud of that.

The MacBook

For those looking to become engineers, the goal in India is to get into an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). These are the best colleges in India and there are about 10000 seats available across 10 or so colleges. 1 Million students write the exam for these every year, to compete for the 10000 seats. In my time, there was a qualification exam that I didn't do very well on, disappointing my teachers who had high expectations from me. I liked my teachers, and I didn't like disappointing them. My dad panicked a little and promised to buy me a MacBook if I ranked in the top 1000 in that exam.

These two were good enough to motivate me to prepare well for that exam. I think I got a rank of 632 or something. That was a pretty good rank and I could get into the institute of my choice. And my dad got me that MacBook 😄

The older IITs were more prestigious and someone with my rank usually chooses those, however, I ended up choosing IIT Hyderabad, which turned out to be the best decision I made. And I mainly chose it because I could choose Computer Science for my bachelors and it was in Hyderabad, a city that was undergoing a startup revolution. I had a few months before I started college so I decided to learn to code. I got the basics of coding: variables, loops, functions, etc. from CS50, the free online course from Harvard. I kinda got bored after that and never continued, but I already had an advantage over the others coming to college with no programming knowledge.

One of the startup books I read was "The lean startup" and when I found that they were doing a Lean workshop in Hyderabad, I went along with two other friends who were curious and inspired to also do startups of their own. At 17, we were the youngest people there by far. I met a lot of active people in the startup ecosystem who seemed surprised by us and didn't know what to say when we asked them for advice :)

The first year

So, remember how I chose IIT Hyderabad because it was in Hyderabad? Well, it was not in Hyderabad. I only found out when me and my parents went for orientation day. It took us 90 mins of driving from our hotel in Hyderabad to get to the institute. The dorm was a temporary accommodation setup with metal sheets for a roof. The rooms were tiny for three people and we had no privacy. To say it was a disappointment was an understatement. However, I found two great friends for roommates who made it all worth it and more :)

Selling timetables

Coming off my recent Lean Startup workshop, I was determined to look for problems to solve and money to make. When we arrived, we didn't have WiFi setup yet, and mobile data in those days was too slow to be useful. We had classes soon, and nobody knew what the timetable was and which classes to go to. So I came up with the idea to print and sell timetables. My hunch was that the new students came here intending to study well, and had pocket money from parents they didn't spend yet. So I went to an internet cafe (30 mins away), printed 10 timetables each per major and went door to door in the boys hostel with the pitch "Are you sure you want to stare and zoom into the tiny mobile screen every morning to figure out which books to pack, when you can just stick this up on the wall". I sold each time table for 10 Rs, about 20x what it cost me to print them. At the end of the day, I only had timetables for one major remaining, only because there weren't 10 guys in that major :)

I was a little flush with cash and extremely proud of myself. And then I got a phone call from my seniors who were baffled that I took institute property and made money from other students, and warned me that I could be put in front of a disciplinary action committee (DAC) if I didn't return the money. Being threatened with a DAC on my second day wasn't very fun and I had to go door to door again returning the money. I also had other ideas I wanted to toy with but this killed that spirit. However, this made me extremely infamous throughout college.

Anybody who spent more than a month at IIT-H knew that having a printed timetable was not very useful, and definitely not worth 10 Rs. So the seniors were either angry that I "duped" people, or were impressed at my resourcefulness. And those who were impressed ended up playing a pivotal role in my growth at IITH :)

The IDP (Independent Development Project)

I don't remember much for my first semester at college beyond the IDP. We had to split into groups of 5 and were given 7000 Rs ($100) to build something cool. My team planned an ambitious "forum" with a different model of threading to allow better discussions or something. We were going to use that money to buy the hosting for this site. None of us has ever built a website but we were all excited by this and registered with this idea. And as it happens with college projects, we did absolutely nothing until the last week and then started freaking out. Obviously, we couldn't build our "forum" in a week. We started looking at different ideas and I came across this brilliant video where someone uses Wit.AI to control their lights. They even shared their node.js code on Github and I had the idea to use it to replicate Jarvis from Ironman.

We bought a Raspberry Pi and a cheap mic and got to work by installing PocketSphinx. I learnt basic node.js trying to get everything to work. In the end we had a demo where you could say "Jarvis, I want to sleep" and the table light we were controlling with a relay turned off. Jarvis worked brilliantly and it was magic. However, the demo didn't work very well in the crowded noisy hall where all the projects were demoed at once, but it did catch a couple of people's attention.

Auragram and Reaction Commerce

One person's attention in particular, Aditya Aagare. Aagare, two years my senior, was running an e-commerce store on Amazon selling imitation jewelry imported from China and it was doing pretty well. He wanted me to build an e-commerce website for him and thought I was a good coder. Well, I charged him 3000 Rs and set out to figure out how to build one. At this point, I knew basic C and basic node.js and maybe could string together a web-server with express and MongoDB. So I did the sane thing and followed a DigitalOcean tutorial to set up PrestaShop and it worked really well. I manually uploaded the products to the store and everything was working quite well and Aagare was happy.

He then wanted me to add Facebook / Google login. When I searched around for it, I found that the social media login plugin was a paid one, and the cheapest one I could find cost $60. And I had charged $50 for the original site. There was no way I was going to get Aagare to pay for that.

I also didn't want to learn PHP because it wasn't "cool" anymore .I disparaged it enough when praising node.js to my friends, that I'd have to lose face if I learnt PHP (told ya I was an idiot). So I set about to find an e-commerce platform written in node.js and I found Reaction Commerce. This guy called Aaron Judd in California was building it. It was in Meteor.js. So I learnt the basics of Meteor and started contributing to Reaction. I still vividly remember my PR where I spent several hours tracking down a missing function parameter. YES, a missing parameter in a test. But I was hooked and I used to spend my nights contributing to Reaction and my mornings sleeping. I used to start work around 7PM, and work on an issue and Aaron used to start work at around 10-11PM and I used to ask him all kinds of questions. Aaron literally taught me programming and I am super grateful to him.

I used to sleep at 6AM and wake up for lunch. I skipped most of my classes and barely had any social life. Towards the end of the semester one of my batchmates saw me and was surprised. He had forgotten I existed because he hadn't seen me since forever. But I don't regret it at all, because I learnt a shitton that semester.

Dick mode: ON

I was still a superfan of Steve Jobs when I entered college and I thought being an ass was cool. So I was an ass to people who asked me for help. For example, if someone asked me a question about node.js, I’d add a “wait, you don’t even know that?” before answering.

I am literally facepalming as I’m writing this but I was a massive dick to people damn.

The second year

The second year of college was interesting mainly because I branched out of Reaction Commerce. I became one of the developers of the website of our college’s technical fest nvision and I built most of the backend systems for the website and related applications, while another student built the frontend: https://gouthamve.github.io/nvision/. I also helped build a new voting portal in node.js and MongoDB (my stack of choice) for the student elections that year.

I also started getting a little bored of contributing to Reaction Commerce. It didn’t have all the features or maturity yet to replace the PrestaShop store, which means I wasn’t running the store myself, but rather fixing issues for OSS users. And Meteor.js had a lot of backend magic that wasn’t easy to understand and at some point, I wasn’t learning enough to be engaged.

At the same time, Adi Vemuru noticed me in a hackathon and was impressed by my OSS contributions. He offered me a job to work on a startup called CarrotID that he was looking to build and I think I was the first engineer there. We were building a website where developers could complete challenges, earn badges and can build a profile, a LinkedIn for developers. I remember building a docker based platform to run arbitrary code, and I decided to use Golang to build it.

Most of the user management, etc. was still written in node.js. I enjoyed working on CarrotID. I was building something from scratch with a few other developers in an office. I learnt a ton trying to bootstrap something from the ground up and I enjoyed working with the team. I learnt a lot about deploying and managing applications on AWS. However, after months of building CarrotID, we still didn’t launch or have any users. Building something that nobody is using isn’t very fun for long.

I randomly chose to go and attend GopherCon India 2016 in Bangalore and it was one of the best decisions I made. I barely understood 10% of the talks, and they were talking about scaling systems, profiling, optimisations and other cool things. Most of it went over my head, but I WANTED to work with scale. Building websites that nobody used wasn’t very enticing anymore. I asked around on my network and managed to interview and land an internship at Boomerang Commerce thanks to Arafath, one of IITH’s alumni that I connected with thanks to Aagare, and other seniors that were impressed by my timetable enterprise :)

It was a sad moment leaving CarrotID and Adi, but it was the right thing to do for me.

Summer internship

Boomerang Commerce was an AWESOME experience for me. They did price optimization for big retailers like Lowe’s, Sears, Nordstrom, helping them price their products competitively and optimize revenue and margins. It was a Java stack running on AWS and they had a large footprint scraping competitors and their prices.

I was writing Java and improving the matching algorithm I think. But what was really interesting is that I was in the “Indian startup culture” here. I remember turning up at 8:30AM to the office and just the security guard there. He made me sit in a meeting room until 10:30 AM when the first people started arriving. HR arrived first and asked me to sit in my team's area. My manager probably arrived at 11AM. Arafath arrived at 12:30PM.

I was calling my manager “sir” because that seemed like the right thing to do. And then Madhu, the person leading the India office walked in and I went to say Hi. He immediately told me to call him Madhu and refer to everyone in the office by their first name. It seems super normal now, but back then it felt like it was a big deal.

I had a crazy schedule then. I woke up at 11AM, went to the office at 12PM, had lunch, and played a bunch of ping-pong with the team. Maybe a few hours of work done. The office policy was that those who had to work late get their dinner paid for by the company, and a group of us used to stay back, have dinner, get a few more hours of work done and leave at around 12 in the night. We sometimes went to the office on the weekends because we had nothing else to do.

It might sound weird, but I LOVED every second of it. I learnt a lot, and had a lot of freedom in terms of what to do. But after a month or so, I started getting a little bored with writing just Java and wanted to see if I can do more. I started looking for areas where I could have an outsized impact.

This was a company that had no observability at all. Whenever they had to debug issues in production, they used to SSH into machines and tail the logs there. One of the common issues they faced was being rate-limited / blocked by the e-commerce sites they were scraping. They used to put a lot of URLs in the queue and then tail logs to figure out why their scrapes were failing.

From my very limited previous devops experience, mainly powered by reading blog-posts, I realized that adding metrics would give them a TON of visibility they lacked before. And I proposed that I would like to work on this. They encouraged me to explore it if I manage to finish the tasks that are part of my internship. I got to work, did a bunch of research and narrowed it down to Prometheus and Influx. For some random reason, I ended up choosing Prometheus.

I deployed Prometheus and it worked quite well. I made a Grafana dashboard that everyone was impressed by and rolled it out to production. And it crashed in 12 hrs. And kept crashing. If I deleted the database and restarted, it crashed again in 12 hrs. This was annoying but exciting! The issue was that Prometheus was running out of inodes due to high amounts of churn. I spoke to the Prometheus maintainers over IRC about the problem and they said it's due to the high churn in the environment and suggested reformatting the ext4 partition on the cloud to have more inodes. Doing that seemed like it worked until Prometheus ran out of inodes and crashed in about 30 hrs.

It was time to fix the root-cause which is high churn. To help avoid getting the IPs blocked, we were killing the ec2 machines every 55mins (billing was per-hour back then), and this was creating new IPs and new time-series. So I wrote an aggregation proxy (like this one), modified the client libraries to push deltas instead of exposing a /metrics point and wired everything up. And things worked beautifully! Seeing metrics in real-time and being able to alert on them had a massive impact on the team.

Unfortunately, my internship ended soon after and I did a HORRIBLE job documenting the setup and making sure others have enough knowledge to take over. I didn’t really understand the importance of a good handoff until after when nobody wanted to touch it cuz it was a mess. It was also a “side-project” so nobody was assigned to it. But my work left a good impression on everyone . I had a TON of fun working at Boomerang. I was SURE I would come back again next summer.

The third year

I came back to college with a weight over my shoulders. I am one of the managers of Nvision, and we hadn’t done much in the summer and had to put up a fest in about 5 months time. So I got busy doing that, falling for a girl, socializing and other things. Basically, I stopped being a nerd and started being a “normal” college kid. I barely wrote any code and honestly didn’t really enjoy the whole idea of managing a fest. I had to beg and cajole my coordinators to do things. I was just doing it out of obligation and not passion and so were they. Everyone who signed up for the responsibility had major buyers' remorse. It was stressful, everything was last minute and towards the end, I just hated it and wanted to be DONE with everything the second the fest ended.

However, I look back on it fondly. We were all in this mess together, and we built some really strong bonds through the process. I learnt a lot about myself too, what I like, what I don’t like and that I suck at handling stress and crumble. Luckily a couple of the other managers were pretty good at handling last minute curve balls. They had nerves of steel, and we had an incident of FAFO where one of the performers was insisting on a cheque for their work before performing even though the contract had provisions for paying them after a month or so. So one of the managers just signed a cheque (even though they had no authority to sign) and gave it. This performer ended up cashing the cheque and all kinds of havoc wreaked loose and my friends held their nerve throughout the process. I realized that if I ever start a company, I need a cofounder like that. Someone who can keep their cool and not break down when things get hard.

But I was done the second the fest was over, and this was early 2017. I was itching to code again and wanted to work on something OSS again, instead of working for a startup. I was looking into contributing to Mozilla and right around that time, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) announced that year's list of organizations and I was going through the list to find out that Prometheus was part of GSoC through the CNCF. I quickly reached out to the maintainers only to find out that they’ve never even heard of GSoC before! I started by sending a small improvement and I had to rewrite it three times to make sure to address all the review comments. It showed I had a lot to learn and I LOVED IT. I sent a few more fixes and asked if there was something slightly bigger I could work on.

I started contributing a little more and Fabian Reinartz, one of the most active maintainers of the project at the time reached out to me and asked if I’d like to work on the new time series database (TSDB) he was working on for Prometheus. I was excited and elated. I was going to contribute to Prometheus' storage engine! I couldn’t believe it. I dove right in and spent many, many hours trying to understand how things worked. Fabian was furiously prototyping and benchmarking to make sure things were working and a lot more performant than the current storage engine, so there weren’t a lot of tests written yet. I started by writing the tests and each test I wrote made me understand things a little better. And I even found a couple of bugs this way 🙂

The summer of third year

I applied through the GSoC process and wrote a pretty detailed proposal. I was in the process of being evaluated when Fabian realized he needed to do a bunch of paperwork (evaluations, etc.) to get me through the whole GSoC program and also didn't get to actually meet me. So he spoke to his company, CoreOS, to see if he can hire me on as an intern. And they said yes. He asked if I’d like to work on the same stuff, for the same pay but also get to visit Berlin for 2 weeks and I of course said yes, because I’ve never actually traveled outside the country before.

I worked on the TSDB and other improvements to Prometheus all summer and even managed to visit Berlin for 3 weeks (asked and got a bonus week!). It was my first international trip and I felt SO welcome by the whole CoreOS team and the Prometheus maintainers. I became a maintainer in the process too. I made friends for life there and I decided that I wanted to live in Berlin for a couple of years “at some point in my life”. As someone who hasn’t even done many domestic trips, moving abroad was extremely aspirational at that time.

I even spoke at a Meetup here about the new TSDB and my work on it. And I thought it went quite well for a first public speaking experience.

I have many new experiences and learnings from this trip. But the deepest is about kindness. I was working with a group of people who were constantly blowing my mind and were well beyond good. I worked with some great people at Boomerang, but I felt like I could hold my own. But working with the awesome folks at CoreOS and Prometheus maintainers was something else. And each was extremely kind and helpful. There were literally no dumb questions. I was never put down for my lack of knowledge.

Maybe I was more mature now than a few years ago, and maybe I wasn’t blindly fawning over Steve Jobs, but I realized that there was no need to be a dick. In fact, being an ass is extremely detrimental to everyone. I wanted to aspire to the level of kindness espoused by everyone I admired. I wanted those who interacted with me in the future to have the same experience I did.

I don’t think I’m there yet, but I do know that I’m not an ass anymore. In fact those who’ve known me long enough know that I’m a bit unrecognizable from the first year of college and I have so many amazing people and mentors to thank for that.

People's focus on work also shocked me. I was used to a chaotic environment where people wasted tons of time playing ping-pong, taking long lunches and spending insane amounts of time in the office. But there was none of that in the CoreOS office. People were laser focused on their work and I don’t think I ever saw anyone use WhatsApp or Twitter while they were working. They also left the office early. The first day I was working, I looked up and the office was empty when it was still extremely sunny outside. It looked like 3PM, so I was amazed until I checked the time and it was 5:40PM. I wasn’t very used to the late summer sunsets yet, but it showed me that you don’t need to spend a lot of time if you focus on work.

The fourth year

My internship ended and I was back at college. And boy did I hate it. I was working on the storage engine in the summer and now I was doing a DBMS course where I was drawing UML diagrams to model the relationships. Things felt boring and I felt like I was wasting my time. A couple of weeks after the start of the college, the director had another of his town halls and announced that it is now possible to take a semester or a year off and come back. All you needed was permission from parents to do so. I was over the moon when I heard it.

The “gap” semester

And the first thing I did was call my mom and tell her that I’m frustrated and taking a year off to work on Prometheus. She had no idea what to say, so her response was “I don’t know, talk to dad once he’s home”. So I spoke to my dad when he got back and he heard my concerns and asked two simple questions “Can I do anything to convince you? Am I going to get the academic tuition and other fees back for the semester?” The answer to both questions was no. So I went and told my academic advisor that I wanted a year off. He was a smart man who pulled me into a room with another professor and tried his best to convince me that it was a terrible idea.

But I did change something. Instead of taking a year off, I decided to take a semester off. And even then I didn’t take the semester off, instead, I dropped all my courses except one on networking with Kotaro Kataoka that I really wanted to take. I started building a long-term storage for Prometheus based on the new TSDB that me and Fabian discussed and was hoping to build a startup on the idea. I built a few things in there when Fabian announced that he was moving to Improbable.io temporarily to build this exact thing in OSS but that he couldn’t convince Improbable to also have me on the project. It became the Thanos project and I didn’t see the point of building something independently. I was in college though and I spent a ton of time contributing to Prometheus and became one of the most active maintainers in that period.

I got invited to a bunch of conferences in Europe to speak and I think I traveled 3 times to Europe in the span of 6 months. I spoke at conferences, and I think I did a terrible job as I didn’t convey my message clearly. I was also stressed and speaking rapidly. But I LOVED each and every trip because of the people I got to meet there. My personal favorite was PromCon.io, where all the Prometheus developers met and we had a small and cozy 220 person event. There was a lot of banter between the speakers, maintainers and the audience and there was a strong family vibe to it.

Richi, who organized the conference in Munich, also organizes barbecues for maintainers and friends in his backyard after PromCon and I remember those extremely fondly. He lives far enough away from Munich that you can see the stars at night and I remember being shook and amazed when I saw stars that clear for the first time in my life. I even caught my first meteor lying on my back in his garden, drunk and just gaping at the sky.

The grind begins

Things came to a head when the semester ended. People were all focused on the “placement season” where companies came to hire students. The day interviews began in my college was also the day I flew to the US for the first time to attend KubeCon Austin. I was okay dropping out of college and was confident that I would be able to talk to companies at the conference and find a job because of my work on Prometheus.

But people were hesitant to hire remotely and I wanted to move abroad. And it became very clear to me that if I ever want to move outside India, I need a Bachelor's degree. Otherwise immigration gets impossibly hard.

But it was a great conference for me, and the highlight was getting to hangout with Tom Wilkie, who had just started his company Kausal to build Observability products starting with a “hosted Prometheus” product. I actually met Tom briefly at PromCon a few months earlier but couldn’t really connect because he was getting married and had to rush right after his talk (maybe for a surprise bachelors party, memory is fuzzy). We spent a decent chunk of time together and over drinks he asked me my story and then told me his story from graduation, working on the Xen Hypervisor, to his latest venture. I told him my journey and shared that I wanted to start my own venture in the future and that I’d love to work for him on Kausal.

He wasn’t making enough revenue yet and mentioned that he was working off of his savings and couldn’t really pay me. I mentioned that I was Indian and that it was no big deal to crash with my parents until we make money 😂. He thought I’d get a good, high paying job through my Prometheus maintainer credentials and wanted me to pursue that. But he did add that we’ll likely be working together in the future.

I came back determined to finish my degree on time. I realized I want to move abroad and it’s the easiest way for me to do that. I had a couple of extra credits from previous years and I signed up for a ton of courses to get me right to the number of credits required to graduate. The professors were kind enough to accommodate my requests and I took the courses that I could pass with the least amount of effort. I was aiming for a mere pass as that was good enough for a degree and not a high grade. Worst case was that I failed a course or two, which I can hopefully retake in the summer break.

I kept contributing to Prometheus here and there where I could. They were the periods of joy amidst the grind. I was still looking for jobs but not wholeheartedly. In fact, I made peace with having to go back to Boomerang Commerce and asking for a 4 day workweek and contributing to Prometheus on Fridays. Just as I was about to give up completely, I got an insanely good offer from a company that was building a monitoring product. This was sounding too good to be true. The CEO was calling me on the weekend, and I even spoke to one of the investors in the company from a top-tier VC who answered the questions I had and encouraged me to join. The CEO was promising to mentor me personally and was thinking that I could lead the company’s OSS efforts.

I hadn’t really kept in touch much with Tom since coming back to university, but I reached out to get his advice. And I vividly remember this, he was like “Goutham, I need to jump into a meeting in 10 mins, but could you talk before that?”. I remember finding a spot in my college corridor and dialing in. He mentioned that I should not sign that offer but rather wait. I was going on vacation with all my friends for a couple of weeks (Holi break trip in the final year after everyone is placed) and he mentioned that I should rather sign the offer after I got back. There was a bit of pressure on me to sign, but he mentioned that if the offer isn’t available in two weeks, it’s probably not worth it. He also mentioned a couple of companies and said that they are looking into the Prometheus space and might be a good fit.

Grafana time

I go on my vacation to the Himalayas and basically spend 5 days without any kind of network. The moment I opened my Twitter, I noticed that Grafana Labs (one of the companies he mentioned above) acquired Kausal and when I opened Matrix (where I communicated with Tom) to congratulate him, I had a message from him “Goutham, I finally have money to pay you!”. I was excited and hopped on a call with the Grafana Labs team right after I got back from vacation.

It had all the cofounders of Grafana Labs (Torkel, Raj, Anthony) and Kausal (Tom, David) in a room in Stockholm where they were meeting after GrafanaCon (where the acquisition happened). It wasn’t really an interview but more of getting to know each other. I was asking the typical questions like “revenue, exit strategy, growth rate, etc.”, and Tom stopped me and told me I wasn’t asking the right questions. I was confused. I asked Tom what the right questions were 🫣.

He looks at Raj and says “Goutham wants to start his own company in the future, and he’s here to learn how to do that. Could you teach him?” I was pleasantly surprised because that was indeed the right question to ask, and I would have never thought of that. Raj looks back at Tom and says, “as his manager, it’s your job to prepare him. Can you teach him everything he needs to know?” And he looks at me and says that he’s more than happy to help me and that he’d love to see Grafanista’s go on to do more ventures of their own and that he’s even happy to invest. He just wanted a 6 months heads up so the company could prepare and it’s not a sudden departure. He mentioned that he’d try to invite me to VC pitches where possible and I did end up sitting in a couple of them over the years.

I further asked if they could move me to Berlin because that was one of my goals. Raj thought because we had a Swedish entity, it might be straightforward and promised to do so. I WAS ELATED. However, the offer was about 60% of what the other company offered with about the same amount in stock. I asked for more, but Raj said that he couldn’t really do more in cash, but basically more than exceeded the total compensation with a generous stock option grant. The startup was early enough that I considered the stock options to have no value, but I didn’t really mind because I wanted to work with Tom and looking to optimize on learning and joining a 25 member team was a good way to do that. My dad couldn’t really comprehend why I was taking a lower paying job.

But these bets have more than paid off. I’ve seen the company grow from 25 to more than 1300 people and to 100s of millions of dollars in revenue. I’ve helped build and launch multiple core products for the company and I learnt what to do and also, more crucially, what NOT to do when building my own company.

I started working for Grafana on April 21st while still at college. I spent a few hours a week working when I could amidst exams, assignments and coursework. I managed to graduate on time with my peers and joined Grafana Labs full-time in June after about a month off.

People

As I write and reflect on this, I am feeling extremely grateful to everyone who’s touched me on my journey. I owe everything to the awesome and amazing people I met both online and offline. Random strangers on the internet taught me to code. They taught me it’s better to be kind.

And I hope I have a similar impact on those who come after me. Pass the torch as they say :)