Hey folks!
My name is Chris Kranz, and I’ve recently joined The Grafter as Chief Technology Officer. I could say all those throw-away things you see on LinkedIn about how excited I am to join, what an amazing opportunity it is, how wonderful it is to work with Rachel and Rhys again, but I thought I’d take a little time to explain a bit about me and my motivation to join.
Firstly, let's do a quick review of my career so far, not because I think it's outstanding in any way, but because it can help folks understand the different paths people take. I’ve worked with people who have had one role their entire career, and I’ve worked with people, like me, that have had a variety of experiences. I have no regrets at any stage in my career, the variety has helped me build empathy and given me a wonderful array of experiences that have led me to meet and work with an amazing set of individuals, many that I’m lucky to still call friends.
My early career started as a graphic designer, and that progressed into being a web developer. I’m old enough to have done Macromedia Flash development, which was so cool at the time! I’ve always worked for smaller companies or agencies, and that meant that I also got quite hands on with Linux, Windows, and other infrastructure bits. Nowadays you might call that a full stack developer, or a DevOps engineer even (although we didn’t do much automation back then), but back then it was just part of the job getting stuff done! You could probably also say that I used to build SaaS applications, but back then we just called them websites!
That knowledge led me into sys-admin territory, which led me to being an infrastructure consultant, installing NetApp storage and configuring VMware. This slowly morphed into presales, and then into architecture and team management (which is where I met Rachel & Rhys). I flipped over to doing end-user / client-side work, this introduced me to DevOps and Cloud in a big way. I worked on a few projects that focused on digital transformation in some way or another. Finally I made the jump to vendorland and joined a stereotypical VC backed, Silicon Valley startup, led by a technical founder. It was a fabulously educational experience seeing amazing tech, the struggles in taking this to market, and actually getting it to work. After my first startup, I then spent 5 years at my second and I was proud to be a part of growing and maturing that company in many different ways. It taught me a lot about how much building a great culture is hard work, and (again) how having a great product doesn’t mean an easy journey to mass market adoption!
Eventually my time was up, and after some time with the family I started building my own micro-SaaS products. I knew there were gaps that I had experienced, or simply ways of doing things better / cheaper, so I got building and exploring the market. It has been great to refresh my development skills, and learn some new cloud technologies through building fully serverless apps that cost fractions of a dollar per month to run.
What about me personally?
Often it’s all about business, business, business, and there’s little about the people behind that. Being the CTO at The Grafter is my second job, my first job is being a father & husband, happily married (10+ years) with 4 kids and a dog (Jabba the Mutt). You may see Jabba captured in video on occasion, although the kids are a bit more shy. As a family, we’ve spent the last 18 months living nomadically. This started as a desire to tour the UK before relocating abroad, but turned into full-time house sitting (looking after other people's houses & pets while they were away) and getting to travel around the UK and parts of Europe. In the last year we’ve lived in: Devon, Dorset, the Cotswolds, Shropshire, Essex, Surrey, Kent, Worcestershire, Cheshire, Scottish Highlands, Aberdeenshire, Pembrokeshire, Limousin France, Midi-Pyrenese France, a quick tour of Spain, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten! We’ve looked after dogs, cats, chickens and fish. We’re currently planning the next leg of our nomadic adventure, which looks likely to involve moving full-time to live on a boat in the Mediterranean! Before you roll your eyes and mutter about how it might be nice to afford that, the boat costs about the same as most people spend on a new car, and living at anchor is free, even staying in a marina is cheaper than most rentals and that’s not even considering London prices!
So why did I join The Grafter?
Everyone loves a good cliffhanger? But more importantly I write too much and we needed to split this out into 2 blogs, so watch this space for part 2 where I dive into some of the reasons why I joined The Grafter in the first place.
Written by Chris Kranz, CTO
Liked what you read and don't want to experience a cliffhanger? Part 2 is up.