Over 20 years ago, I started my professional career joining GE working as a Systems Engineer for a large bank and doing several public sector assignments. After a few years, I worked for Sprint. Several years later, I founded my first startup which was sold to Quest Software (which in turn was bought by Dell). After doing 6 months of consulting for a Grid computing company (remember those?), I started another company. This company would ultimately be bought by Solarwinds. I moved on to Dell’s DCS (hyperscale compute) group for about 9 months. It was then that I wrote about Data Gravity, for the first time. I also discovered a project VMware was working on called Project Maple.
Project Maple was later renamed Cloud Foundry. Blogging about this discovery led to my recruitment by Jerry Chen to join the Cloud Foundry team. Working with the Cloud Foundry team in the early days was surreal to say the least. Eventually I was recruited away to Warner Music Group, where I became SVP of Engineering, working for Jonathan Murray. At WMG, we built a first of its kind software factory by leveraging Cloud Foundry OSS, which enabled an increase in application delivery speed by an order of magnitude.
Just after the first version of the factory shipped, I was contacted by Adam Wray, asking if I was interested in joining him at Basho as part of a new funding round with a new investor. This sounded like a great opportunity to experience joining a NoSQL startup. After leaving Basho at the end of June, I found myself at a periodic point. Much like Nick Weaver announcing recently that he had returned to EMC, I have returned to GE.
I have joined the GE Digital business as VP of Software Engineering, working as part of the Wise.io team on Machine Learning for IIOT.
Why GE Digital and the Wise.io team?
I see something that is beyond the other opportunities I considered. The most compelling reason, is being able to have a profound effect on an incredibly large and diverse number of businesses and therefore, affecting a disproportionately large number of people’s lives in very positive ways. GE Digital’s Predix Platform directly supports all of the different GE Business Units’ IoT efforts, including the; Oil & Gas, Energy, Aviation, Health, Power, and Transportation divisions to name a few. The Wise.io team is amplifying the benefits and discoveries made by looking at all of this IoT data and applying machine learning against it. The work that GE Digital is doing with Predix and the Industrial Internet of Things is truly game, and life changing.
The Wise.io team itself is comprised of some of the smartest people I have ever worked with, Josh Bloom being a prime example. All of them are humble and kind, yet wickedly smart. They have created a unique culture of diversity, happiness, positivity, humbleness, respect, openness; all of this in a highly professional productive environment that avoids unnecessary meetings. The Wise.io team is truly an incredible team, and I look forward to learning and growing with them.
Why me?
The unique challenges that the Wise.io team has are familiar to me; How do you grow/build a “startup” inside a large company, and how do you grow that team to scale? What are the processes needed to achieve this? What does the reporting structure look like? Where do you find talent? How do you bridge the large company with the startup inside?
Some of the technical challenges they face also line up with my experience. How do you run a PaaS at scale? How do you run a PaaS on a PaaS? How do you go about building and operating a software factory? Those are some of the examples of why this unique challenge and team were so attractive and such a great fit.
If you are looking for a great engineering or data science position and either live within commuting distance of San Francisco, or would consider relocating, and believe that Machine Learning and IOT are the future, please send me a DM on twitter (@mccrory).
Data Gravitas 