David Carney

It is a big title.

And I just want to be clear, I'm certainly not the only one thinking about strategy at Tailscale.

There's a lot of moving parts.

Well, I wouldn't even say I'm leading the holistic strategy.

The stuff I'm working on in close partnership with my co-founder Avery and a new VP product and other parts of the team, I'm focusing largely on

I guess the strategy at the edge of Tailscale, which is something that's sort of come about in the past year or so.

The simplest way to think about Tailscale, and sometimes people ask me like, well, what are you building?

What do you do?

And so explaining it to like a lay person is very helpful.

And so first and foremost, Tailscale makes it possible to connect any two devices anywhere in the world with strong guarantees of the identity of the user and the device at either end.

And if you can do that for any two devices, you can do it for an arbitrary number.

So you can start adding like one device, one user, one server, whatever at a time until you have basically what looks like a mesh network and it's completely private.

Then you can layer on things like access controls.

So you can be like, oh, only these people should be able to access like these servers or devices.

For instance, like the engineers can only access production.

The accountants can only access the finance servers, so on and so forth.

But fundamentally what you can do with Tailscale is create private networks.

And so when we launched the product, I guess we launched it maybe six and a half years ago now, it was pitched as a VPN alternative or zero trust kind of replacement.

It does a lot more than what a VPN is, but at the heart of it, it's a connectivity platform that lets you build private networks that are fully secured and sort of using a mesh overlay pattern.

So that's the core of what Tailscale is and it has been for a very long time and we've been continuing to build and build and build on top of that.