E20: Building Sustainable Businesses in the Tech Industry with Craig McLuckie

In this enlightening episode, I have the privilege of hosting Craig McLuckie, a tech industry veteran who has made significant contributions to the cloud computing industry and is currently the Co-founder & CEO of stacklok. We begin by exploring his journey from Microsoft to Google, where he co-authored Kubernetes, a pivotal project that has shaped the industry.  We also delve into his post-Google venture, Heptio, and the strategic planning that led to its success. Craig offers valuable advice on building and commercializing open source projects, highlighting the importance of understanding the trade-off between reduced activation energy and value extraction. Finally, we discuss stacklok, Craig's latest company focused on enhancing the security and sustainability of open source projects.  This episode is chock full of insights for anyone in the tech industry, especially those interested in cloud computing, open source or GTM strategy.Highlights:[1:10] - Understanding the origins of Kubernetes[2:38] - Exploring distribution and GTM challenges, insights and concerns[5:49] - How the competition evolved in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service landscape[7:08] - Diving deeper into startups and GTM strategies based on Craig’s experience at Heptio[10:47] - Advice to founders building OSS projects who are looking to commercialize[13:11] - Thoughts on optimal sales/engineering/product teams in seed stage companies[16:16] - Digging into stacklok, what Craig and his team are building and why[23:00] - Craig elaborates on his quote “Let’s make infrastructure really boring”-- Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world. Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.