What Makes Cloudsmith Special: Reflections on 1 Year as CEO

1 year ago today, I became a Cloudsmither. I joined this incredible company that Alan Carson and Lee Skillen co-founded because we have an incredible product, built for a massive market, and we were really just getting started.

Reflecting on what I wrote in Hi. I'm the new CEO :), the blog stands up as a solid argument for Cloudsmith. We’re displacing legacy artifact management vendors, winning some of their largest enterprise customers with full-scale replacements across hundreds of teams with thousands of developers.

As I approached my 1-year anniversary, I asked myself what really makes Cloudsmith special. I landed on three particular qualities of our personality that I think are ultimately the winning qualities that will make Cloudsmith a truly great and historic company.

Feet In the Clouds

First, we’re massive-scale cloud SaaS geeks. Cloudsmith has been multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) from the first lines of code Lee wrote back in 2016. When your native language is cloud SaaS, you solve a different class of problems. You’re constantly optimizing for throughput, performance, and uptime. Internally, our engineers refer to the company as “Cachesmith.” I love that. 

Of course, that means that when we add new edge servers, or find a clever way to serve packages, or rebuild indexes, or redistribute worker queues, or improve EFS throughput, our entire customer base benefits. Our small and mid-size customers get the same performance boost as our largest enterprise customers. Without requiring an upgrade, or a maintenance window. SaaS has been the standard in many corners of the software world for the past decade or more, but it’s still relatively rare for artifact management, in part due to sheer scale - we’re moving around data volumes measured in petabytes, after all.

Cloudsmith is constantly thinking about how to make our global package delivery network faster and more reliable, so our customers don’t have to worry about it. Our massive cloud infrastructure is a big barrier to entry; it’d be hard for a startup to compete with us anytime soon. It’s also hard for any single team, at even the largest enterprise, to compete with our level of scale and global reach. By depending on Cloudsmith to power their artifact repositories, our customers get to focus on building their own great software.

Pumped About Packaging

That leads me to the second quality—we’re software artifact nerds. We really care about the internals of all the different package managers. We get excited about trends across the public open-source registries. We keep up on the latest advances in security scanning, provenance, and developer-native distribution. We obsess over how our customers can make their build pipeline more efficient and how we can make it easier to migrate tools to Cloudsmith. We’re giddy about ways to stream more real-time data to our customers’ reporting and analytics tools.

Devoted to Customer Delivery

Lastly, we’re on top of things. That’s another way of saying we’re customer-focused, but at Cloudsmith that manifests itself as truly proactive support. We love finding and fixing problems before our customers are even aware of them. When you build a culture that rewards the kind of intellectual curiosity I’ve described here, you’re able to run faster. Sure, we have distinct roles for our customer support engineers and our product engineers. But when a customer issue pops up in our monitoring systems, we swarm the problem. This is true DevOps—our engineering team stays close to the runtime. It’s another aspect of SaaS that legacy on-premise single-instance software companies just can’t compete with.

Cloudsmith solves a boring problem. For our core customer persona—platform engineering teams—boring is good. Platform engineering is responsible to their developer teams for getting packages where they need to go. We do this for our customers, so we’ve solved a really specific pain. Business school 101—focus on what differentiates you; outsource the rest. 

Thank you to every Cloudsmither for living our values every day. Thank you to Lee and Alan for embracing me, empowering me to lead Cloudsmith, and allowing us to act as a united leadership team. And thank you to all of our customers for your trust and loyalty. We’ll do everything we can to continue to earn them. I’m always open to your feedback: ceo@cloudsmith.com.

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