At some point in their careers, most entrepreneurs face pivotal decisions that go on to define the direction of their lives.
For Martin Mao, one of these came in 2013, when he was writing web applications for mining companies and large banks in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. At 25, he was running his own software development firm and earning a comfortable living. The work was 9 to 5 and relatively easy, leaving Mao with a great work-life balance. It was also, he says, “soul crushing.”
“I thought about how I could maybe see myself doing this for the rest of my life, staying in Sydney, being really comfortable,” says Mao. “But then I thought, ‘Wait, is this all there is to life?’”
Just thinking about the possibility made Mao restless. A few months later, he took a job in Seattle leading one of the technical teams at Amazon Web Services, the company’s highly profitable cloud computing division.
This itch for new challenges would propel Mao through multiple chapters of his career, ultimately prompting him to start his own company with Rob Skillington, a fellow Australian he met at Microsoft. Chronosphere, which the two founded in 2019, is now valued at $1.6 billion. Its “observability” products help keep digital businesses up and running by quickly focusing on the data and insights that matter. That means that Chronosphere’s platform can find and fix incidents before they impact the user experience.
Chrosnophere’s customers include Snap, Zillow, and DoorDash. And Mao estimates that the company’s platform reduces the volume of a company’s observability data — and the cost of maintaining that data — by up to 60 percent (representing up to $15 million in annual savings). Along the way it’s also saving developers thousands of hours per year.
“I do get bored easily,” Mao admits. “I think it leads you to take on new challenges more quickly, so you end up with a broader spectrum of experiences. It’s actually been a helpful trait for a scaling startup.”
A Thirst for New Challenges
Mao first learned to code on a whim. In high school, he took a friend up on an offer to join a coding competition at the University of South Wales. Mao knew nothing about coding, but he was intrigued by the opportunity. His friend taught him Visual Basic, which he picked up quickly. The three-person team placed in the top five in Australia, which led to scholarships to study computer science at the university for each of them.
After college, Mao got an internship with Google, followed by another internship that led to a job at Microsoft in the Seattle area. Part of a team helping transform Microsoft Office from a desktop app into a cloud service, Mao initially found the work exciting. But after two years, he grew weary of the slow and methodical two-to-three-year software release cycles, and decided to move back to Australia to start his own — as it turned out — very comfortable, software development business.
Mao’s next gig — overseeing a 20-person team at AWS — taught him how to lead and how to build new services on a massive scale. His team worked on the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud, a simple interface that allows customers to easily obtain and configure cloud-based computing capacity, and its Systems Manager tool that lets customers make updates to their hosted software. But again, after two years, Mao felt he had learned everything he could at AWS.
That’s when Skillington urged his fellow Aussie to join him at Uber. An interview with Uber’s senior-most engineer Matt Mihic (now Chronosphere’s head of engineering) sealed the deal. “It was the toughest interview I’ve ever had to do,” Mao recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, I need to work with this guy. I could learn a lot.’”
When Mao joined Uber in 2015, the volume of data the company was processing was growing ten-fold every year, a breakneck pace that often overwhelmed its technology infrastructure. On Uber’s two busiest nights of the year — Halloween and New Year’s Eve — its in-house observability platform would fail, cutting off executive-level visibility into what was happening with the business. Technical staff had no idea, for instance, if customers in certain regions were unable to request rides, or if drivers couldn’t locate the people they needed to pick up. Mao and his team were tasked with fixing the problem.
After creating a temporary solution, Mao’s team realized that what was needed was an entirely new tool that could serve a fast-growing, cloud-native computing company like Uber. Operating in the cloud not only meant more data but also more complexity. Since there were no suitable observability products in the market, Mao set out to build something that could mitigate system disruptions by detecting, notifying, and helping to pinpoint any issues that arose with their services. He opted to use open-source software in order to attract engineers from other big tech companies to his team.
Launched in 2017, the new observability platform allowed Uber to operate without any outages, including during high-volume events. It has also given the company’s technical leaders a real- time view of business metrics like number of rides given and the amount of payments processed.
An Alignment of Stars
But for Mao, solving this kind of big problem inevitably created a new one: what to do next? “By 2018, big engineering problems at Uber were hard to come by,” he says.
In December of that year, he had an epiphany. At an industry conference in Seattle, major cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, Google, and others like VMware and Red Hat decided to throw their weight behind a new cloud-based technology originally designed by Google called Kubernetes. The new reality was that every enterprise was going to choose between a hybrid or multicloud strategy and it was only possible if they adopted Kubernetes. “This meant that most technology architectures were eventually going to look like Uber’s,” Mao recalls. “And that meant every company, not just a few big tech companies and the Walmarts of the world, would have the exact same problem we had solved at Uber.”
Mao and Skillington, who was also at the conference, realized that if ever there were a time to start a company, this was it. “We knew there was this big opportunity in the market to build the product we wished we could have bought while at Uber,” Mao says. “I didn’t think in my lifetime I would have another opportunity like this.” On a personal level, however, it was a terrible time for a startup. Skillington and his wife had a young toddler, and Mao’s wife was pregnant with their first child. After consulting with their wives, the two men agreed to move forward. “We asked ourselves, ‘If we don’t do this, are we going to kick ourselves and regret not trying?’” Mao says. “The answer was a clear yes.”
Learning On the Job
Mao took on the CEO role because, after years of solving technical problems, he was ready for something new and eager to understand how a business runs. Skillington became CTO and led the development of the Chronosphere platform, which went relatively smoothly, in part because the two had built a similar product at Uber.
For Mao, who had no experience running a hyper-growth business and had never taken a business class, running the company proved to be much more difficult than he expected. “We had no idea how to go to market or do enterprise sales,” he says. “We stumbled our way in.” He and Skillington first tried selling the product themselves, only hiring a salesperson when the conversations became too numerous for them to handle. Learning how to set up payroll, pay taxes, figure out customer contracts, and set up finance systems were all steep learning curves. “I don’t think an MBA is required, but it definitely gives you a 101 on how to run a business,” says Mao.
In lieu of a business degree, he was methodical about reaching out to others for help, finding a sales advisor and marketing advisor, and asking Chronosphere’s investors like Greylock to put him in touch with other founders and CEOs. “I talked to people who were at least one or two steps ahead of us and they were always so generous with their time,” he says, “even though you always felt guilty asking really basic questions of somebody who must be so much busier than you are.”
Jerry Chen, a partner at Greylock and founding investor in Chronosphere, says Mao’s ability to pick up things quickly helped put Chronsophere on a strong footing. “It was clear from first meeting him that Martin is a fast learner,” says Chen.
Snapchat and DoorDash became early customers. Five years later, Chronosphere now helps both high-flying startups and global brands reliably monitor and deliver cloud services to a total of two billion end users. And the company has yet to miss a single SLA (service level agreement) for any of its customers.
Culture Matters
As Chronosphere heads into its sixth year, Mao reflects on the factors that have allowed the company to grow quickly. One of the most important, he believes, is a positive culture that starts with “no egos.”
“If you’re just going to build a successful business but the culture is terrible, no one is going to enjoy the company or enjoy the journey. So why do it?” he asks. Mao says he’s turned down numerous qualified candidates because he didn’t think they’d be a good fit for Chronosphere’s down-to-earth and collaborative culture.
“Every CEO will tell you they simply can’t predict everything the market, investors, or competitors will throw at you. However, there is one thing I believe you can control, and that’s your core values.”
These values have led to an acknowledgment that Chronosphere doesn’t have to do everything itself. For example, instead of building new telemetry pipeline capabilities for its observability platform, the company acquired the startup Calyptia.
For once, Mao’s unquenchable thirst for new challenges has yet to make him restless. Running Chronosphere, he says, puts him to the test every day. He’s giving the company everything he has because he doesn’t see a second act as an entrepreneur. “Both Rob and I feel like this is our one time,” he says. “We’re in it to make it count.”
