Joe Beda is a technologist with a history of working across many parts of our industry from web browsers to real time communication systems to cloud computing to AI.
Joe is currently CTO for Stacklok. Stacklok is building a Kubernetes hosted AI platform for enterprises to not just deploy AI, but actually make it work for their business.
Most recently, Joe was a Principal Engineer at VMware. He organized Kubernetes technical direction across VMware and VMware Tanzu. Joe arrived at VMware via the acquisition of Heptio, a leader in the cloud native movement and a company that he co-founded. Upon completion of the acquisition of Heptio by VMware, Joe joined the Principal Engineer community at VMware and helped to expand the technical and product investment in the Cloud Native space. This includes defining and driving the architecture behind VMware Tanzu.
Before starting Heptio, Joe was an Entrepreneur in Residence with the VC firm Accel. While exploring startup ideas, he helped guide portfolio companies and advise on new investment opportunities. During this time he initiated the SPIFFE project (Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone) which went on to become a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) member project.
Previous to VMware and Heptio, Joe was an engineer at Google for over 10 years. While at Google he is most well known for his work in co-founding the Kubernetes project. While it has taken a cast of hundreds (thousands?) to make Kubernetes what it is, Joe has the very first commit in the public Kubernetes git repo.
His career at Google spanned many different areas. He started his career there working to bring Google Talk (which eventually became Google Hangouts and Google Meet) to market, working to interface with telephone systems around the world and establish new signaling protocols such as the XMPP-based Jingle protocols. He then worked with the Google ads system to help advertisers get the most out of their advertising budget using machine learning and big data analytics. Joe was then a founding member of Google Cloud Platform. He started the Google Compute Engine project and led many new technologies at Google including an expanded investment in virtualization, virtual networking, virtual block devices, API systems, and customer tooling.
Joe started his professional career at Microsoft, where he was a core team member for Internet Explorer and led the graphics teams for Windows Presentation Foundation.
Joe holds a B.S. from Harvey Mudd College and lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Rachel (a medical doctor and also an HMC alum) and his two daughters.