For the 182nd episode of The VentureFizz Podcast, I interviewed Bill Ledingham, CEO of Fairwinds.
Bill has a knack for noticing market opportunities where a company can scale. As either a founder or executive, the majority of the companies he’s been involved in have exited. We discuss this topic in terms of how he decides where to focus his time and how he evaluates the potential market need.
Earlier in his career, he was a founding team member of SpeechWorks which went public, merged with Scansoft, and later became known as Nuance. Another more recent success story was Black Duck Software, where he was CTO & EVP of Engineering. The company was acquired by Snopsys.
He is now the CEO of Fairwinds, the Kubernetes enablement company. The company’s software and services enable organizations to run secure, reliable, and scalable Kubernetes infrastructure.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover:
- A journey through Bill’s career and all the different companies.
- The background story on Fairwinds which was formed via the acquisition of ReactiveOps and all the details on how they are helping their customers.
- What is Kubernetes and why it is so popular these days?
- Advice for founders on figuring out their Go-to-Market strategy.
- Bill’s thoughts on how to build a career path to a CEO position.
- And so much more.
Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.