“Love for the game…” What keeps Ockam founder Matthew Gregory going during the current situation
As we close the books on the first month of sheltering in place in the State of California, it has begun to sink in that this is the new normal for many of us here in the Bay Area. As Head of Ecosystem for Samsung NEXT in Silicon Valley, I’m used to being out and about attending founder breakfasts, investor dinners, and external community gatherings. But my world has been turned upside down in the first several weeks of social isolation as a result of the Coronavirus, and I know I am not alone.
A few weeks ago, in one of the many virtual meetings I attended with our global teams, a colleague based out of our office in Berlin shared a powerful article published by Vogue Germany about the “Coronavirus and its effects: This is how people in the creative sector, public service, gastronomy & Co. are dealing with their new situation” (original article in German by Alexandria Bondi de Antoni and Maria Hunstig). I got very inspired by these deeply personal stories featured in the article and began wondering how founders and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are dealing with this uncertain situation surrounding all of us.
To find out, I invited five early-stage founders from different backgrounds and industries to tell us about their personal stories and challenges, share what motivates them to keep going during these uncertain times, and what they are hopeful about in the future. To read more of their stories, please check out the Samsung NEXT Medium channel.
The first entrepreneur to be featured in this series is Matthew Gregory, founder and CEO of Ockam, which builds open-source developer tools that bring security to message exchanges in IoT. Ockam has been part of the Samsung NEXT Guest Program in San Francisco, and Matthew is a toolmaker at heart. He’s an active part of the Azure Open Source community, built a weather API that your favorite weather app probably uses, and is a former America’s Cup sailor.
1. What does the current situation mean for you as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?
Ockam is in a unique situation. We were built from the ground up to be a remote-first company. This means that our operations, tooling, and communications style has always focused on how our team can be highly performant — even if we are not colocated together. Because we build open source software the products we build lend themselves for a remote-first approach.
Open source is all about the ecosystem. It means that our code is on public display and anyone can and is encouraged to participate with Ockam. To facilitate a community approach out in the open we must tool ourselves to work with companies and individuals all around the world. GitLab and Hashicorp follow similar models and we’ve learned a lot from the steps they’ve taken in front of us.
Even though there is radical change all around us, it still feels like ‘all systems are normal’ at Ockam.
2. How are you dealing with the situation on a personal level?
I’ve worked remotely at Heroku/Salesforce and also during my time at Microsoft Azure. I have a house in Oregon and I’ve spent years buffing out of my office to be a sanctuary for getting things done. I have a dedicated space that I only use for work. I think that this is really important for remote work productivity.
Even though I am in my house, I still have a morning routine and mentally ‘commute to work’ as I head into my office. I do the same thing at the end of my day. As long as I don’t turn on the news, everything seems pretty normal.
3. How does this situation change your perspectives? — for worse and for better
In the earliest stages of Ockam I got a lot of feedback that remote-first was a bad idea, or at the very least it raised a lot of eyebrows. Given the normalcy of our day-to-day at Ockam we are at a major competitive advantage as we press forward with steady progress — particularly against stagnant incumbents who have grown to a halt over the past couple weeks.
I think that this period will demonstrate how productive a remote-first culture can be when it’s part of the core ethos of a company.
4. What motivates you to keep going?
Love for the game.
Starting a company is hard. Really hard. We are committed to building a world-class team at Ockam. I get so much energy from learning from everyone on our team every single day. We are at a great stage where we are a small but growing team. We are at a sweet spot where I can have 1:1 time with exceptionally smart people to learn about their backgrounds and experiences around the security problems we solve for developers. Yet at the same time, we are growing at a rate where new knowledge keeps getting added to the team all the time. It’s really exciting to be in a continuous state of learning. That’s what I love about Ockam and our team.
5. What are you currently doing to help?
I’m generally a positive person. But some of the news over the past couple weeks is terrifying. If we all do our parts to stay safe and isolated, things will eventually make a turn for the better. The best thing that I can do is pretty simple: it’s to do my part to stay home and to create a safe haven transparency and normalcy for our team.
6. What are you hopeful about in the future?
Even though we are a ‘deep tech’ company, or mission is people-centric. Our mission is to enable millions of developers to build a secure and private connected future. Ultimately we want to make builders jobs easier and difficult technology simple and easily accessible. Those builders are going to create autonomous systems for transportation, connected devices that protect privacy in our homes, and secure medical devices — to name just a few use cases.
I am hopeful that we will live in a better world in the future, and I am excited to be building a part of it.
I’ll be sharing more founder responses over the coming days. If you are an early-stage entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and you want to share your story to inspire others, I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to reach out to me directly at fernanda@samsungnext.com.
