It all started because he was unemployed, bored, and didn’t want to be a system administrator anymore. Luke Kanies founded Puppet in 2005, raised $87 million in funding, and was then fired from the company for which he sacrificed his health and probably a bit of his sanity in 2014. He then set about developing a personal CRM product through a company called Clickety in 2019, but chose instead to shutter it before the first round of funding due to health issues. Talk about perspective.

Listen to this fascinating story of how Luke, starting his career as a sysadmin, pioneered Puppet that focused on IT DevOps. He wanted to bring sysadmins to the table with developers and sales where they could have a voice in developing the tools they needed to solve problems. Growing up with autism, maneuvering the corporate world meant Luke heard things differently and that required a tremendous amount of adjustment, compromise, and flexibility. It ultimately wore him down to a nub.

Leadership presented a new set of challenges for someone who just wanted to solve the problems that no one else thought were important. He figured out that leading people meant making hundreds of decisions daily around people. He struggled to find executives who put his and the company’s interests ahead of their own. And that led to burnout.

Luke’s take on leadership is refreshing, eye-opening, and flat out revolutionary. While his mission has always been solving problems that impact the world, Luke now understands that the right people, aligned with the right focus and vision, will always make the difference in success.

Learn more about Luke Kanies and Puppet

You can find more information on all our episodes at Vertical Elevation, and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz or on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolbschultz/.