Why I Joined Stateless – The Vision, Culture, and Product

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When I was asked to write a blog post on why I joined Stateless, multiple reasons came to mind… the product, the culture, and the vision. 

“Without vision, the people perish”

There is an old middle-eastern proverb that says ‘without vision, the people perish’. Having a clear, easily understandable vision is a critical part of the success of any endeavor. 

Stateless’ vision is one of the top reasons why I work here – the vision to make networking and network connectivity simple – so simple that you don’t need to be a network engineer (or CLI guru) to create, manage and tear down networks (although being a network engineer will almost certainly help).  

From a personal perspective, the exciting part about this vision is that it requires a relentless focus on usability – constantly thinking about how the product needs to work from a user’s point of view and putting yourself in the shoes of the operator. This concept drives every design decision we take – to make the product intuitive to use from the moment the product first hits a customer’s shipping dock through to how to automate network operations years after it was originally installed. 

‘Making the complex simple’ is a particular passion of mine and is definitely shared at Stateless.

But vision isn’t the only driver.  

What Stateless is doing today is something that hasn’t been done before and is actually something that many people said was ‘impossible to do’ (by both technology vendors and even some investors!). The challenge of achieving what ‘can’t be done’ is a great motivator and a passion that is common to every person in the company – to challenge existing ways of thinking and constantly grow both professionally and as a person.

“The challenge of achieving what ‘can’t be done’ is a great motivator and a passion that is common to every person in the company – to challenge existing ways of thinking and constantly grow both professionally and as a person.”

So why do I like working at Stateless?  

For starters, the product that Stateless is developing is something brand new to the industry, patented, and has the potential to radically change the way that the networking arena operates (i.e. it can create a market inflection point – similar to the way that Apple did to the music industry when it released the iPod and changed customers’ expectations, experience and capabilities overnight). 

What Stateless is doing brings a ‘cloud-like’, drag-and-drop experience to a traditionally complex discipline and sets a new standard to how network connectivity should be thought about. This is a huge attraction to me and pretty much every other person that works at Stateless.

Defining – and defending – the type of culture you want

The next attraction is more subjective, but one that is just as important – the culture. Startups can be a hectic and often stressful place where culture starts off as healthy but tends to degrade with time. Defining – and defending – the type of culture that you want to work in is really important and is one of the key areas that I have seen Stateless be different in. 

The importance placed on culture – the concept of living the culture day by day (and not just having a pretty culture statement hanging on the wall gathering dust) is something that’s particularly rare but very enjoyable. Working in an environment where being studious, supportive, striving, sincere and stateless (i.e. adaptable) is not only encouraged, but promoted daily is a real breath of fresh air.  

Whilst all this is good and true, I must come clean and admit that working at Stateless is made even better by the fact that we see the Rocky Mountains every day from a sunshine-laden Boulder, Colorado where an outdoors lifestyle is the default. Location does make a difference!

Changing the world one network at a time

So boiling all this down, Stateless is changing the world one network at a time – whether it enables DevOps teams to innovate faster, Colocation facilities to gain new business through providing new tenant connections in minutes not days, or enabling thousands of organizations to securely encrypt and send traffic across the internet without the need for expensive network appliances.

Being able to change the paradigm of an industry is a rare thing, and at Stateless, that is exactly what we are doing.

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