For the last six years, I was the General Manager for CloudWatch and X-Ray at Amazon Web Services. CloudWatch and X-Ray enable customers to monitor the health and performance of their applications. These are large scale services with millions of customers and of course AWS is the premier public cloud provider on the planet.

Today is my first official day with Coalition as their Head of Engineering and I could not be more excited. This begs an obvious question. Why did I make this seemingly big career move?

You can read more detail about my thought process and journey in more detail in this Medium post. The summary, though, is that I wanted to find a role where I could help a company solve a large and impactful problem for customers and in doing so materially impact the outcome for that company and their customers.

I was looking for a company with demonstrated product-market fit and a track record of revenue growth. Equally as important, I needed the mission of the company to resonate with my own sense of what ‘matters’. If I am going to pour heart and soul into something, I need to feel that there is a positive outcome for society.

Enter Coalition. When the recruiter pitched an engineering leadership role to me, it was the cybersecurity aspect that drew me in initially. Cyber was on a short list of segments that had particular interest for me. It’s technically interesting and has clear tailwinds that almost certainly persist for the foreseeable future. I’ll be candid and say that at first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the insurance aspect. Nonetheless, they seemed to be right in the zone I was looking for. The company clearly had product market fit and was growing rapidly. I started doing my own diligence on the company and set up time to talk with their founder/CEO Joshua Motta.

All of the pieces started to come together the first time I got to sit down with Joshua. For me, it was my most direct experience with founder-market fit. I’ve listened to founder stories before and felt that I had sensed founder-market fit, but experiencing it 1:1 was pretty special. I challenge anyone to sit down with Joshua and not come away with a clear sense of just how much he was born to build this company.

Getting back to my comment about wanting to work on something that matters. Coalition certainly checked that box too. Helping businesses everywhere to solve the challenge of cyber risk is a laudable goal (and dang hard problem too!). It’s here that the lightbulb went on for me around the company’s approach to cyber risk and the interplay with insurance. The insight that led to the founding of Coalition is that Cybersecurity is a risk management problem, not a technology problem. Where there is technology, there is cyber risk, and no amount of technology can completely eradicate that risk because it’s fundamentally a human problem. What’s unique about Coalition is that they bring cyber tools, data, and deep security expertise wrapped in a business model that aligns all of the incentives with their customers to solve cyber risk. The result is a differentiated solution for a timely problem and the reason why they are growing so fast.

What I found in Coalition was a company where I felt my impact would be directly correlated to the outcome of the Company. We are tackling a problem that matters to the world and our customers. The company has demonstrated product market fit and revenue traction and a huge vision for the future. Last but not least, I feel a personal connection to the founders and team.

If any of this sounds exciting and motivating to you, we are hiring! We need all forms of software engineers (backend, frontend, full stack), SREs, software managers, security engineers and analysts, product managers, along with many other roles. Come help us solve the challenge of cyber risk and build the next great InsureTech company! Apply on our careers page or DM me if you would like to learn more.