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Gabe Monroy

I’m Gabe Monroy, Chief Product Officer for DigitalOcean. AMA 👇

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Hey everyone, I’m Gabe Monroy, the new Chief Product Officer at DigitalOcean. I’m responsible for DO’s customer-facing products and the design, product management, and engineering teams that build and operate them. With 40M new developers joining the community by 2030, I am working hard to develop and grow their businesses on DigitalOcean. Before DO, I was the VP of the Azure Developer Experience group at Microsoft and founded a startup named Deis, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. Outside of work, I am an amateur farmer (read: I have no idea what I am doing). I live on a 35-acre farmhouse in Boulder, Colorado, where my wife and I have lots of chickens, livestock guardian dogs, and some Nigerian dwarf goats coming in March. Every morning I wake up at 5 AM to take care of the animals. The rooster helps me wake up. Ask me anything—about DigitalOcean, developers and building startups, product and design excellence, operating distributed systems inside a hyperscale cloud, sales, and GTM strategies, or maybe telling the difference between a rooster and a hen. Edit: appreciate the great questions so far. Keep 'em coming! I'll be back to answer more questions on Wednesday at 3pm Pacific Time. Edit2: and that's a wrap! Thanks for the fantastic questions, folks. You can always find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gabe_monroy. My DMs are open.
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Nikita Kukreja
Hi Gabe, thank you for this post! Very interesting to know about your farm, I would love to see a picture of those Nigerian dwarf goats! I'm beginning to work in Sales (in a SaaS start-up), and we are in the initial growth phase. I was wondering if you could give me tips? Also, how do you continue to be motivated even when your sales efforts are not producing results fast enough?
Gabe Monroy
@kukreja_nikita sales in a SaaS context is an interesting role. In theory, with product/market fit and the right level of marketing, SaaS products should mostly sell themselves. Instead sales people in SaaS companies often find themselves debugging product/market fit as part of the sales process. Maybe the jobs-to-be-done haven't been identified, the product value proposition isn't clear enough, or the product simply doesn't fulfill the promise to customers. It's your job to channel that feedback to the product and engineering teams. You should really be functioning as an extended part of the product team, versus solely acting as a quota-carrying salesperson (though you may do that also). It's important to remember that the job of a startup isn't to build products, it's to generate a repeatable sales model. One that can be scaled with further investment. Hopefully that challenge is interesting to you!
Kyler Phillips
Hey Gabe, what's the biggest challenge working at DigitalOcean?
Gabe Monroy
@kylerjphillips so far my biggest challenge has been building connections with people virtually when starting a new role. It's a challenge many people have faced throughout the pandemic, so not unique to me or DO. Teams are built on a foundation of trust and that's especially true at the executive level, where the decisions you make impact many people. It's hard to build that trust foundation over Zoom, but it's worked out better than I thought. It probably helps that DigitalOcean was >60% remote going into the pandemic.
Shivi Jalota
Working on E book to launch super soon. Talks about how brands can leverage Linkedin by following certain formulas. How do I reach out to brands in order to get them have a look at the book
Sid
@shivi_jalota Promotion ke bahane kuch bhi out of context puchna zaruri hai?
Shivi Jalota
@fullofsid apse thodi puccha !
Sid
@shivi_jalota Fair, respect the hustle
Shivi Jalota
Osman
Do you guys have plans to introduce a Global Load Balancer over your different data centres, similar to CloudFlare?
Gabe Monroy
@ozzie Yes I believe there’s more we can do on the GLB front. We partner closely with Cloudflare today on some of these capabilities. What would be your ideal experience?
Jack Torse
Hi Gabe, Thanks for doing this AMA. I am wondering if DO has any plans to introduce: 1. Services for identity / auth management 2. Windows VMs (specifically Windows Server for AD usage) It seems like those two things would be the key to getting larger SMBs on to the platform? I love DO! Thanks again for doing the AMA.
Gabe Monroy
@jack_torse Identity and auth management are absolutely on our radar. I’m a big believer in identity-based auth being a step-function improvement for developers, I believe DO has the opportunity to uplevel simplicity using some of the new technologies available today. On Windows VMs, that is not something we have on the roadmap right now. It’s a tricky problem that crosses hypervisor technology as well as OS licensing, and our research hasn’t flagged this as critically important to customers yet. Do you have a scenario you can share to help me understand your goals and outcomes? Lift and shift maybe?
LeRoy Gardner
What do you wish you knew about what you do now, before you started it?
Gabe Monroy
@leroy_gardner1 I wish I knew that you don't have to build a prototype of a product or feature to understand if it's likely to be successful. Often showing some potential customers a mock UI or product experience is enough to capture the feedback you need to hit the target on the engineering side. Building and testing mocks with customers is so easy and cheap compared to building a full prototype. Of course when I was an engineer I used to convince myself that I had to build the prototype first. That was because it was more fun than talking with customers, and I wanted to write the code. However when those prototypes inevitably failed due to lack of early customer feedback, I started to find the failure of the products more painful than talking to customers early on. Eventually I realized that talking to customers early makes engineering a lot more fun. Now I couldn't envision it any other way.
Rox
Hey Gabe! Have noticed DigitalOcean streaming a bit on Twitch lately - what's your plan for dev content in the coming year and how does live streaming work into it? And... do you need any help? :D
Gabe Monroy
@roxkstar_74 I'm not sure since it's not my focus area, but I'll ask someone from that team to provide an update here. FWIW I am huge fan of live streaming myself. It's a really authentic way to engage with a community. And yes, we always need help! I'll leave this here: https://www.digitalocean.com/car...
Samantha Tse
@roxkstar_74 Catch DigitalOcean live streams by following us on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitch. Check out previously live-streamed DigitalOcean Tech Talks (https://do.co/techtalks) and Cloud Chats (https://do.co/cloudchats), and let us know what else you'd like to see! As for overall dev content, we'd love to create even more resources that help builders around the world grow, from tutorials to videos, Q&A, docs, and beyond: https://www.digitalocean.com/com... P.S. We're a bit biased, but really enjoyed this recent live stream featuring Gabe & Anil:
Jack Crane
Does DO have a plan for serverless or ai offerings?
Gabe Monroy
@jackcrane on the serverless front, absolutely. Sign up for our beta here: https://www.digitalocean.com/nim.... AI is something we are looking at also. Is there a particular capability you have in mind? AI inferencing via off-the-shelf models? Full ML capability?
Jack Crane
@gabe_monroy Hi! Thanks for the response! Nimbella seems really cool! I was kind of thinking of having either something similar to google's Cloud AutoML or AWS's SageMaker, ~or~ just having the ability to load in a GPU to a droplet would be great!
Gabe Monroy
@jackcrane makes perfect sense. I'll take that back to the team!
My Business
Will Veazey
What is cheapest cloud digital managed hosting pricing of DigitalOcean?
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