Joining GCP

Hey all,

Happy New Year!

After almost a decade at Pure, I decided I needed a new challenge and joined Google. 

Working at Pure was the (professional) honor of my life. I joined before we had a product or customers and had a front row seat in seeing us go to $1.6B in annual revenue in a few short years.  I’m forever grateful for the tremendous amount of trust the founders and the executive team put in me and the many opportunities I was afforded. It was challenging, exciting, rewarding and simply a lot of fun. The best part, however, were the people. I thought of many of my coworkers as friends rather than colleagues, bosses or reports. I enjoyed an environment where I could be myself and focus on getting the job done instead of corporate politics, which so often creep in as companies grow.  

I’ve been talking to Google recruiters on and off several times over the years. I was always fascinated by the company and its reputation for incredible technology and a highly accomplished team. That said, I felt that maybe it was a bit too big for me - even when it was just a few thousand people…:-)  This time, however, I was offered a very intriguing option: to work on Google Cloud and to lead our site in Warsaw. Both of these caught my attention. 

GCP is the fastest growing hyper scaler. We can leverage the incredible global infrastructure that has been built over the years for our other services (search, Gmail, YouTube etc) as well as our industry-leading portfolio of AI technology. This lets us not just “move enterprise infrastructure and apps to the cloud”. It lets us build offerings and services that simply do not exist anywhere else (on prem or in the cloud). And that’s before even factoring in the tectonic shift happening in enterprise IT as a result of containers and Kubernetes, the latter of which of course coming out of Google as well. So, the stage is set for Google to completely transform IT over the next decade, and being part of that sounded like fun. 

Then there’s Warsaw. As some of you know, I had the privilege to set up Pure’s EMEA R&D hub in Prague in 2019 and last year. My family and I had a terrific time there and our kids made some of their best friends in Prague. Obviously, the Google opportunity is a little different but no less appealing. It’s the same overall geographic region but a different country and city. There is already a stellar team with strong local leadership. So this is really picking up on great work already done and taking it to the next level. Raise the profile. Grow even faster. Strengthen the culture. It’s one of the few places in Europe where leading-edge core infrastructure work is done at massive scale. If you’re a European engineer or engineering manager interested in that sort of thing, it’s the place to be. 

So, COVID permitting, we’ll be packing up once again and move to Warsaw at the end of this year (if you’re interested in renting a nice 4 bedroom in Sunnyvale, the house will be available!). I very much look forward to being there. In the meantime, I have a lot to learn and many people to meet in my new job - I think I will be quite busy. 

That’s the update! Thanks for reading this far and hope you and yours are doing well. 

-Dan