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In this episode of The Exit: Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Senadia and previously AppSera and creator of Cloud Foundry, explores his storied career in tech, entrepreneurship, and building platforms that shaped modern cloud computing.
From starting with a Commodore 64 at age 12 to working at Google, VMware, and founding AppSera—Derek shares how he turned distributed systems challenges into billion-dollar ideas. He unpacks the high-speed growth, fundraising challenges, and exit to Ericsson, before launching his latest venture, Senadia, built on the NATS open-source tech now downloaded over 300 million times.
Derek opens up about:
- Getting into tech as a teenager in the 1980s
- Building Cloud Foundry at VMware after a call from Paul Maritz
- Starting AppSera and scaling to 150 employees in 12 months
- Navigating an acquisition by Ericsson amidst Kubernetes disruption
- How to survive the VC game: from seed to Series B
- His playbook for product-led platform companies and why most fail
- The emotional toll, decision-making pressure, and rewards of being a founder
- Why introverts need to lean in and chase serendipity
- How Senadia is powering AI at the edge, connected cars, and Industry 4.0
“Be humble, lean in, and don’t delay hard decisions” — Derek’s advice rings true for every founder navigating the speed and pressure of today’s tech ecosystem
Personal Bio:
Derek Collison is a 30 year industry veteran, entrepreneur, and pioneer in secure and large-scale distributed systems and cloud computing. He helped change the way financial, transportation, and logistics systems fundamentally worked while spending over a decade at TIBCO, designing systems that still power much of those industries today. During his time at VMWare, Derek designed and architected CloudFoundry, the first open-source enterprise PaaS. He then founded Apcera, a company designed to drive security and policy into easy to use platform technologies. After the successful sale of Apcera to Ericsson, Derek took the messaging technology he designed to power the CloudFoundry and Apcera systems, NATS.io, and created Synadia. Synadia is pioneering secure and global messaging as a digital utility to help drive security and powerful communication and collaboration into IoT, edge, and cloud computing systems.
Derek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekcollison/
Website: https://www.synadia.com/
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