It has been a great year to invest in our future at ScaleVP. Not only have we been adding a handful of exciting new deals to our portfolio, we have been active in making the most important investments that we can make – great additions to our team. We are very pleased to announce that Ariel Tseitlin has joined ScaleVP from Netflix where he was the Director of Cloud Solutions. As a Venture Partner, Ariel will join Andy Vitus in building our cloud computing portfolio which has been a focus area for ScaleVP for some time. Andy met Ariel over a ScaleVP dinner he hosted this summer at the OSCON open source conference and walked away impressed with Ariel’s depth of knowledge, which would be hard to match given his role at Netflix, and with the sense that he would be a good fit with the ScaleVP team.
Netflix is one of the industry’s pioneers in building a modern distributed service, making the bold choice to run entirely on a public cloud infrastructure. Not only have they led the industry in innovation but have done so in an open and transparent way to help others following a similar path. Ariel’s team created and released into the open source community many components of the NetflixOSS Cloud Platform that have enabled Netflix to build and operate a highly available, scalable and resilient system. Some of the more widely covered components include what is now famously known as the “Simian Army“, including the Chaos Monkey, which is technology that creates actual failures to ensure the systems running the Netflix streaming service remain resilient and reliable. Ariel speaks regularly, and will continue to, on trends and best practices within this market.
ScaleVP believes that this trend from traditional owned data centers to a shared “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) is a fundamental shift in computing architecture that will provide multiple investing opportunities and is still in its early phases. ScaleVP is looking to invest in more companies that are poised to take advantage of this shift and even help accelerate it. Recent cloud-related investments we have made include Boundary, PubNub and Datastax. That was the reason we focused on adding a best-in-class cloud operating executive like Ariel to our team.
Prior to Netflix, Ariel was VP of Technology and Products at Sungevity and before that was the Founder & CEO of CTOWorks, a software consultancy helping early-stage entrepreneurs deliver their first product to market. Earlier in his career, Ariel held senior management positions at Siebel Systems and Oracle. Ariel holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA with honors from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania which he attended at on nights and weekends and where he got bit by the investing bug, making him a perfect fit for us.
Please join us in welcoming Ariel to the ScaleVP team!