Tom Wilkie, the CTO of Grafana Labs, talks to us about his professional journey. We cover how he got into software engineering, his first startup, working as an EM at Google, and what motivated him to go back to an IC role. We talk about his time at Grafana from when they were only 25 people to now when Grafana Labs has more than a thousand employees. Tom’s journey cannot be told without diving deeper into the technical side of things - we discuss observability, distributed systems, and hard technical problems. Where to find more about Tom and Grafana Labs: - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomwilkie - X - https://x.com/tom_wilkie - Grafana Labs - https://grafana.com/ - Grafana Labs events - https://grafana.com/events/ Where to find Bartek: - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/ - X - https://x.com/bwplotka Where to find Ivan: - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-valkov/ - X - https://x.com/ivvalkov As always, feedback and questions are welcome! You can use this form -https://forms.gle/NmUGeqMtyP6H6mMP9 0:00 - Tom’s intro 7:09 - How Tom got into software engineering 15:05 - Tom’s first startup 21:25 - Tom’s experience as EM at Google 28:04 - Joining Weaveworks as employee number 7 38:51 - Tom joining Grafana 45:32 - Grafana’s Third Act 53:12 - Startup advice 59:41 - Perseverance and motivation 1:04:35 - How Grafana acquires startups 1:10:25 - Where to find out more