Enabling a Blameless Culture
“Who’s responsible for this?!”
This is the sad conclusion many organizations come to when a website or service goes down. They deduce that the issue was a person’s fault, instead of focusing on the root cause and identifying steps to systematically prevent such issues from happening again.
This is exactly the type of culture an aptly named Lightspeed portfolio company, Blameless, is changing.
Companies often struggle to find efficient ways of resolving incidents that affect services running in production. Delayed resolutions can have major impact on revenue and brand, and cost organizations in resources and time.
In an attempt to solve this issue, the discipline of SRE, Site Reliability Engineering, has taken a stronghold in most large enterprises. SRE aims to apply software engineering and DevOps principles to focus on not only fixing incidents when they happen, but also preventing them from happening at all.
The majority of companies attempting to implement SRE are finding themselves stuck — forever fire-fighting incidents. Unfortunately, when many of these companies try to manage incidents they turn it into a game of hot potato. This in turn encourages the natural tendency of people to assign blame to the person who caused the issue so they can avoid having to fix it themselves. This is the problem Blameless is solving.
Blameless encourages companies to embrace failure as the norm. It does this by encouraging companies to allocate for downtime before it happens, and creates a reliability orchestration platform to guide organizations to meet and exceed their availability expectations over time.
This is the key to enabling a culture where product, development and operations teams work together to improve as a whole rather than just reacting to issues without clear visibility of what to focus on.
What initially attracted us to Blameless was Ashar Rizqi, Lyon Wong and the team’s passion to fix issues in SRE workflow — which they experienced firsthand during their time at Box, Mulesoft and Microsoft. We’re also fortunate to have a long history with Ashar and Lyon, as Ashar spent time at Mulesoft, and Lyon at Lightspeed. Their vision and commitment to success drove us to co-lead their seed round early last year.
In just a year, the Blameless team has put together a talented, mission-driven team. And large companies like Home Depot, Digital Ocean, and MasterClass, have quickly got on board with their vision, adopted their technology, and been impressed with the results. As early investors, we’ve been inspired by how quickly they launched to market, and the pace at which companies are adopting their solution.
We couldn’t be prouder to work with the Blameless team, and we’re excited to double down and help them accelerate their vision by co-leading their Series A. We’re confident they’re going to revolutionize a new culture, a Blameless one.
- Ravi Mhatre and Jay Madheswaran
