Dimensional Data

Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV. Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, we’re back. We’re here in Chicago at KubeKon. We’re wrapping up our day two coverage, our last guest for day two. We’ll be back tomorrow, though. But let me introduce you to Kyle Campbell, right? Kyle Campbell: That’s right. Alan Shimel: Kyle is the founder of cto.ai and we’re going to find out about cto.ai and a little bit about what they’re doing here at KubeKon. But before we do that, Kyle, first of all, welcome. Kyle Campbell: Thank you. Alan Shimel: Second of all, let’s hear a little bit about Kyle. Kyle Campbell: Yeah, thanks. Alan Shimel: Tell us your kind of journey. Kyle Campbell: Yeah, well, first of all, great to meet you in person. I’ve talked in the past. Yeah, so my journey, I’ve told this story before, a little unconventional. I grew up in Nova Scotia in Canada, a small town. Been on the internet since the age of eight and just had no interest in the formal past. So I’ve been building software from the early days of the .com boom. I may not look at it, but I got some of the scar tissue. But I was self-taught software engineer, so open source was the key to my success and good developer tools. Alan Shimel: Sure. Kyle Campbell: And I came up through the cloud and open source era and then started founding developer platforms in 2014. The first company I built was a developer platform, the real estate space. Zillow acquired it in about eight months, which was interesting. Alan Shimel: Very. Kyle Campbell: And then I bootstrapped a DevOps agency quite successfully and started to find that there was a lot of opportunity for next generation developer platforms, which led me to cto.ai. Alan Shimel: Excellent, man. What a great story too. You still up in Nova Scotia? Kyle Campbell: I’m not. I moved to the other side of the country. I live in British Columbia now. Alan Shimel: Good for you. Kyle Campbell: Love the outdoors. Spend a lot of time with my son camping, fishing, and trying to get outdoors and just enjoy the beautiful- Alan Shimel: Loving it. Yeah, no, it’s beautiful. I mean, not that Nova Scotia’s not beautiful. It’s brutal in the winter, but it’s a beautiful country, part of the country. Let’s talk cto.ai now. So look, I’ve founded multiple companies myself. Every founder I’ve ever interviewed or spoken with in 30 years, they don’t just say wake up and say, “Oh, I feel like founding a company today.” There’s kind of like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right? There’s something driving you like, “I got to do this. This needs to get done.” What was driving you that needed to get done here with cto.ai? Kyle Campbell: Yeah. I mean, as I described my past, a lot of my journey was self-taught and stand on the shoulders of giants. And really important thing for me was developer experience and ease of use and tooling early on in my career because that enabled me to really drive my competencies as a developer and keep up with these people that had computer science degrees and master’s and all these things, right? Alan Shimel: […]