Happy Thanksgiving week to everyone in the US! Last year at Thanksgiving my Dad asked me, ‘what do you like most with your job?’ – and rather than a trite and quick answer I thought about it a bit and answered that one of my favorite parts over the past twenty-five years, and one of the things that continues to bring me deep joy, is inventing new product capabilities, new features and functions, and entirely new product lines that, I hope, truly delight clients. I love to invent and build. I love to sit with customers, listen to their hardest problems, synthesize what they say, pattern-match it against too many decades of experience, and find that spark – that moment when you see the solution clearly and know you can build something extraordinary. And if you get it right, that idea becomes something real, something durable, something that solves a meaningful problem for people who trust in you.
Do that long enough and you end up with seventy or eighty conversations with patent attorneys, followed by filings, prolonged engineering cycles, and ultimately real products that move industries forward. And there’s nothing quite like hearing a customer, or even sometimes a competitor, describe a capability your system delivers, knowing you were the one who invented it.
The roles I have held have helped me to see the world from many different angles. I’ve been the inventor. I’ve been the engineer and the product leader driving an idea from whiteboard to revenue. I’ve sat under oath in depositions about intellectual property. I’ve briefed closed sessions of governments, intelligence agencies, legislative committees, and national security councils about the risks of international software piracy and malfeasance. I’ve spent countless hours in M&A diligence trying to determine whether a company’s software is genuinely its own. And I’ve watched nation-state adversaries infiltrate hardware and software supply chains, embed back doors, and compromise technologies that businesses and governments rely on.
These experiences reinforce one truth: engineering and business integrity is not optional. In a world where adversaries can embed developers into supply chains to create hidden access paths, integrity is essential. In a world where pagers can be turned into weapons, where firmware updates can become attack vectors, where AI accelerates the ability to steal and exploit data, integrity becomes the only sustainable defense.
That’s why I’m especially proud of the culture we have built at Qumulo. For thirteen years, we have written our own software line by line. In many cases, we even built and tuned our own compiler. When the industry pivoted toward cloud-native architectures, we didn’t go buy someone else’s technology or repackage a third-party stack. We spent three years architecting, refactoring, and re-engineering our entire platform to operate natively in a distributed cloud environment. It was difficult, disciplined work, but it was honest work and it is why our platform has such a native integration with all major clouds without compromising on-premises.
And recently, I’ve had to certify with national intelligence and defense agencies, something very few companies in our sector can claim: not a single developer on our team has ever worked for a foreign defense or intelligence service, and never in any cyber-operative capacity. That matters. It speaks to provenance. It speaks to trust. It speaks to the integrity of the people who build the technology our customers rely upon.
This is the heart of the matter. Commercial honesty isn’t an old-fashioned ideal—it is the bedrock of long-term relevance. Build your own products. Earn your own innovations. In M&A, perform authentic diligence. Understand the provenance of the software. Understand who built it and why. And when dealing with organizations influenced or backed by nation-states, understand exactly who is writing your code and what motivations animate them. Nationalist incentives and commercial incentives behave differently, and when they collide without integrity, industries, customers, and governments all pay the price.
We are entering an era where governance, fiduciary duty, and supply-chain transparency matter as much as the technology itself. The attack surface is expanding. The methods are evolving. And in a world where data has become both a currency and a weapon, the stakes have never been higher.
So ask the hard questions. Who am I doing business with? Are they aligned with my values? Are they building something of their own, or piecing together something that never belonged to them?
Integrity is not a slogan. Integrity is the differentiator. It is what makes innovation sustainable. It is what protects the trust of customers. Our core values are what have enabled Qumulo to build what we have built: honestly, transparently, and from the ground up. And in a world that grows more complex every day, it remains the most important advantage any of us will ever have.
