Stan and his four co-founders have built a wonderful business from Brno in the Czech Republic. A lot of Bootstrapping by Piggybacking principles have been applied to gain leverage.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?
Stan Markov: I’m originally from Bulgaria from a small town. It’s a hundred kilometers from the seaside. I’ve always loved mathematics and computers. My mom was a mathematics and informatics teacher. My first access to computers was when I was five or six. It was still 8-bit with green screens. That’s when I wrote my first code. My father was an engineer. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I’m naturally interested in these types of topics.
I have been based in the Czech Republic for the last 17 years. I came here to work for IBM. I started working for IBM back in 2006. My original plan was to come here for a year. I really like this place. The city is called Brno. We call it the small Silicon Valley of central Europe. It has IBM, Red Hat, AT&T and many others. There’re a lot of technical universities. It’s a great place to start a tech company.
At IBM, I started working with VMWare. I was an IT Archictect there. That’s where I met my co-founders. That’s where we got the idea for Runecast.
Sramana Mitra: What was the idea for Runecast?
Stan Markov: At IBM, we built the global VMWare Center of Excellence. We started working with virtualization and VMWare technologies when it was not so popular. At some point, everybody started virtualizing even their most critical workloads. That enabled us to collect the best people and build this big center of excellence that was not only managing a lot of VMWare environments for IBM customers but also defining reference architecture, best practices, and security guidelines for VMWare customers of IBM all around the world.
We had to do a lot of firefighting like solving outages on the VMWare systems or undergoing compliance audits. We realized after years of firefighting that in over 90% of the problems that we had to deal with, the root cause was already documented somewhere online in a blog article or official documentation. Typically, admins have to spend hours, even weeks, to troubleshoot and do root-cause analysis to find out what caused the problem.
We thought that we could take a more proactive approach. If we were to find a way to harness all that human-readable, unstructured data and turn it in to machine-readable rules, we could use those rules to discover misconfigurations and problems in the logs before they cause an outage or security breach.
This would save a lot of headaches for a lot of IT practitioners. It would help them be more secure and to run their systems in the most optimal way. We realized that this will be massively useful. That’s when we decided that it’s time for us to leave IBM and start Runecast.
This content was originally published here.
