Will Veazey

Hey everyone, I m Gabe Monroy, the new Chief Product Officer at DigitalOcean. I m responsible for DO s customer-facing products and the design, product management, and engineering teams that build and operate them. With 40M new developers joining the community by 2030, I am working hard to develop and grow their businesses on DigitalOcean. Before DO, I was the VP of the Azure Developer Experience group at Microsoft and founded a startup named Deis, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. Outside of work, I am an amateur farmer (read: I have no idea what I am doing). I live on a 35-acre farmhouse in Boulder, Colorado, where my wife and I have lots of chickens, livestock guardian dogs, and some Nigerian dwarf goats coming in March. Every morning I wake up at 5 AM to take care of the animals. The rooster helps me wake up. Ask me anything about DigitalOcean, developers and building startups, product and design excellence, operating distributed systems inside a hyperscale cloud, sales, and GTM strategies, or maybe telling the difference between a rooster and a hen. Edit: appreciate the great questions so far. Keep 'em coming! I'll be back to answer more questions on Wednesday at 3pm Pacific Time. Edit2: and that's a wrap! Thanks for the fantastic questions, folks. You can always find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gabe_monroy. My DMs are open.

We all have moments where we go, "I wish I knew that when I was young", I know I have plenty *cough* buy bitcoin when I was 15 *cough*. What's yours?

TBH, I think chasing your dream is a luxury and not a given, I couldn't just do it out of gut feeling, I had to build toward that. In my case, there have been two determining factors: - a certain level of security for a few months ahead - the right project (have done a couple of projects before, both eventually dropped, the third one was the charm!) What about you?