We are in a period of fragmentation in software. When anyone can build an application quickly and cheaply, the number of application vendors explodes, and in a crowded, uncertain market, they compete on iteration speed and price. Customers get more choice at lower cost — a more perfect match between supply and demand — but the imperative to build fast and cheap comes at the expense of quality. Trust in any single product erodes, data sovereignty and privacy become escalating concerns, and the ability to serve the largest, most complex, highest-security organizations becomes rare.

Conversely, outsized value in this era will be created by companies that build infrastructure products — the products customers use to build and run their own applications — for the largest enterprises and governments. Beyond the need to derive value from a product, these customers will not adopt products they do not trust, and earning that trust demands technical depth, patience, and perseverance. The difficulty in building such a product is a moat in itself, and these customers will pay a premium for it.

The companies that get there will be disproportionately rewarded (see: Temporal's recent valuation jump, even Salesforce’s recent government contract wins). Of course, startups rarely start by selling to large enterprises, and there's significant value to capture along the way with infra products that win on developer experience. But the enduring companies will build a path to these large, complex customers who make decisions on the order of decades.

So this is where I focus: building teams that ship infrastructure products meeting the security, reliability, and scale demands of the most complex customers. Today, I own Astronomer’s self-hosted data orchestration and scheduling product, selling to many of the world’s largest banks and retail companies. Previously, I was a PM on Google Kubernetes Engine (where I originated kro.run, the first open-source collaboration between Google, AWS, and Azure), and before that I got to build with the founders of Kubernetes at VMware. Across these roles I've worked with enterprises and governments worldwide, learning what they buy, what they're allowed to buy, and what it takes to earn their trust.

Lately, I’ve been building agentic workflows that automate parts of the PM job, cobbling together my own AI inference platform out of OSS components, and exploring how these experiments could be productized for large enterprises. 

I got here…indirectly. I’m a chemical engineer from Adelaide who met a co-founder in Sydney, took an investment in Santiago, and spent a year in Chile doing what I only later learned was called product management. The startup combusted but the product obsession stuck.

Outside work I’m probably drumming, songwriting, doing yoga, traveling, or looking for a great restaurant. The picture is from a hot air ballooning expedition in Cappadocia, Turkey — a 10/10 experience.