Kelsey Hightower: From Sleeping in His Car to Distinguished Engineer, Google

11/16/23 • 68 min

Today’s guest is Kelsey Hightower, a distinguished engineer and developer advocate at Google and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open source software and cloud computing.

As a curious and motivated self-learner, Kelsey dropped out of College and taught himself the skills required to start his career as an independent contractor for BellSouth – a telecoms company in Atlanta helping the community to get online. From there, Kelsey set up his own business – an electronics store before becoming involved in the open source world, working at New Relic, CoreOS, Puppet Labs, and most recently at Google.

A self-taught developer, Kelsey’s work on Kubernetes and at Google, from which he just retired, is well-known* so I wanted to focus our conversation on his life - how he got into tech, his love of learning, what drives him, what it means to be hopeful and the one piece of advice he would offer a younger Kelsey.

I know I am not meant to have favourites – these conversations are like children - but I have to say this is up there with one of my most loved conversations. I learned so much from Kelsey and I think you will too.

Enjoy!

Kelsey on Twitter

Danielle Twitter / Instagram / Newsletter

Photo of Kelsey is part of the Faces of Open Source Project by Peter Adams

*If you want to learn more about Kelsey's work history, give this episode from Ardan Labs a listen.

Today’s guest is Kelsey Hightower, a distinguished engineer and developer advocate at Google and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open source software and cloud computing.

Enjoy!

Kelsey on Twitter

Danielle Twitter / Instagram / Newsletter

Photo of Kelsey is part of the Faces of Open Source Project by Peter Adams

*If you want to learn more about Kelsey's work history, give this episode from Ardan Labs a listen.

Previous Episode

Josh Dahn: Building A School with Elon Musk (REPLAY)

What does the future of education look like? This is a question I have pondered for the last ten years or so and today’s guest - Josh Dahn – has the answer.

Eight years ago, Josh Dahn was teaching Elon Musk’s kids at Mirman – a private school for highly gifted children in LA when Elon approached him about rethinking the traditional education model. Josh jumped at the opportunity and in today’s episode, Josh talks me through that first meeting with Elon and how they worked together to found the Ad Astra school based at SpaceX.

Based at the SpaceX site, it was a school where the children weren’t separated out by year group or grades as you say in the US, but instead, the education matched the aptitude of the children, and the education was focused around problem solving and teaching to the problem, as opposed teaching to the tools.

Josh went on to co-found Synthesis which is an innovative online school, helping students to prepare for the future by getting them engaged and excited about complexity and solving for the unknown.

Josh is Founder and Executive Director of Astra Nova School (previously Ad Astra) in Los Angeles.

Enjoy!

NB This interview was recorded in August of last year and first appeared in Series 4 of the podcast.

Josh Twitter

Synthesis website / Twitter / LinkedIn / Instagram

Danielle Twitter / Instagram / Newsletter

Episode edited by Jolin Cheng

Next Episode

James Wise: Why The World Needs More Entrepreneurs

Today’s guest is James Wise – a Partner at Balderton Capital and author of Start-Up Century: Why we're all becoming entrepreneurs - and how we can make it work for everyone, which we will discuss in today’s episode.

James grew up in Manchester among a community of business owners and inspired by them has spent his career surrounded by, helping and investing in entrepreneurs.

Balderton Capital, where James is Partner, is a venture capital firm in London was one of the first to focus on investing in European startups and to date has raised over $4.5 billion and invested in over 250 European startups, many of which have gone on to do extremely well.

James’ focus as an investor is on artificial intelligence, sustainability and health tech and he is a board member and observer on multiple portfolio companies, including Sophia Genetics (which is listed on the Nasdaq), Depop which was acquired by Etsy for $1.6 billion, and many other including some which went on to be sold to Amazon and Epic Games.

Prior to joining Balderton, James also helped to launch and run one of the UK’s first social venture funds and he is also a member of the UK Government’s Industrial Development Advisory Board.

In this episode, we learn more about James’ background, how his future path was unknown and why he believes in the rise of entrepreneurship as a power for good. We discuss what he looks for in a founder and why Balderton set up its Founder Wellbeing and Performance Platform - treating its founders like elite athletes who benefit from keeping an eye on health and wellness whilst undertaking an often gruelling entrepreneurial life.

We also talk about his book Start-Up Century and thanks to our friends at Bloomsbury Publishing, we have a special discount for listeners - you can buy the book at a discount here by adding discount code DANIELLE30 at checkout.

Enjoy!

James on Twitter / Start-Up Century / Balderton

Danielle Twitter / Instagram / Newsletter