Turning Blame into an Opportunity to Learn with Lyon Wong

03/16/22 • 36 min

Lyon Wong, CEO and co-founder of Blameless, a complete reliability engineering platform that brings together AI-driven incident resolution, blameless retrospectives, SLOs/Error Budgets, and reliability insights reports and dashboards that enable businesses to optimize reliability and innovation. Lyon has a history steeped in founding and investing in start ups and company building, which has lead a heavy involvement in Blameless where he can apply the many lessons learned.

In this episode, Lyon breaks down his background and how it influenced his decision to become a founder at Blameless. Over the course of his career he noticed trends in other companies where teams were prevented from learning opportunities because they were worried about catching the blame. As a result Lyon identified the need in the market for a way to synthesize the cultural tensions around blame. Lyon’s insight on building trust, partnership, and communications on learning are deep and worthwhile. Check out the full conversation!

Highlights:

An introduction to Lyon and Blameless (00:00)
Jumping back into being a founder after time as a VC (2:28)
Creating a blameless culture (05:50)
What Lyon does different as a founder and investor and his early experiences (09:50)
The importance of credibility (16:10)
The “core skillsets” needed in start ups and some crucial beliefs (18:55)
The larger and smaller pictures, and balancing short and long term (25:34)
Lyon’s parting words and wisdom for founders (32:51)

Highlights:

An introduction to Lyon and Blameless (00:00)
Jumping back into being a founder after time as a VC (2:28)
Creating a blameless culture (05:50)
What Lyon does different as a founder and investor and his early experiences (09:50)
The importance of credibility (16:10)
The “core skillsets” needed in start ups and some crucial beliefs (18:55)
The larger and smaller pictures, and balancing short and long term (25:34)
Lyon’s parting words and wisdom for founders (32:51)

Previous Episode

Building a Kubernetes Operations Company with Haseeb Budhani

Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, a Kubernetes operations company joins the conversation. What a Kubernetes operation company is as companies use Kubernetes across their organizations they need the right automation, security, visibility and more. These are needs that come from multiple teams working across multiple applications, and it creates a lot of work. This is where Rafay Systems is looking to cover down.

Haseeb introduces us to the work at Rafay systems, and his own discovery of the problems they want to address. Haseeb discusses the history of Rafay’s establishment, and how they are striving to create a fluid and robust workflow engine. He reflects on how his previous experience has reinforced the lessons he brought to Rafay, how to connect to the customers, and more! Check out the conversation!

Highlights:

An introduction to Haseeb and Rafay Systems (00:00)
Lessons learned at other companies and staying the course (6:12)
Successfully connecting with the customers needs (12:29)
The lessons learned already at Rafay and some helpful advice (15:36)
Where the Kubernete’s ecosystem is headed (25:22)

Links:

Haseeb

Next Episode

Innovating on the Edge with Michael Tanenbaum

Today’s guest is Michael Tanenbaum, CEO and co-founder of Mycelial, an edge data platform for distributed local first applications that is built with developers in mind. Myceclial takes the accomplishments of the cloud native movement to bring data that exists outside the data center into the hands of the developers themselves. With a focus on data from the “edge”, which Michael defines as anything from a smart thermostat, to a 5g tower, applications, and more.

In this episode Michael lays out how he and his partners captilized on the oppurtunity of recent innovations in cloud native, and in turn commercialize the need to “get applications out of the data center to work harmoniously with applications in the data center.” He and his co-founders are striving to build complex edge native applications and local native data. Michael breaks down the “three pillars” of edge native to provide some crucial definitions, how he identified the needs Mycelial addresses, the diverse range of obstacles they’ve already surmounted, and more!

Highlights: