The five of us had been tasked to build two new products in the short term. Object and block storage. What we had missed was that we would pick-up all the existing storage products as well.

At the time, in the cloud department there had already been two tries at object storage, the first one had been a public offering based on RiakCS, a now defunct database. The second was several private clusters used internally based on Ceph. In the dedicated department, there were more products. The Carbon14 cold storage that I had built as well as six other products. A backup FTP product, an RSync backup product and four different block storage products each with its specificities.

As soon as the team was operational we inherited nine live products in addition to the two complicated ones we had to build from scratch. It both felt fair and unfair at the same time. Everyone could change to a new team, so it wasn’t fair to have people being blocked from changing just to maintain their existing products. An SRE team had been built as well, but they were very busy with the compute product, so we just took them on.

To handle this load, we had to recruit. There was a lot of fascination with technical challenges. They were, in my opinion, completely useless in deriving the actual usefulness of someone to accomplish work. They were the premises of leet code tests. I was very vocal about my opinion of them, close to useless, but didn’t have any ideas on what to substitute them for. This is where Florent and Loic designed a secret tailored exercise to our team, which they tested on me and the other team members. Every person recruited after the design of the test had to pass it and I’ve used variations of the concept since then.

We recruited both before and after the design of the test. Within a year, the team grew from five to fourteen at its peak. In joining order there was : Quentin as intern then permanent, Florian, Nico as intern in the AI team before jumping to us and then permanent, Albert from the baremetal team to us, Ramzi as an intern, Maxime, Alex, Marian as part time intern and last but not least Louis.

The deal with the pivot was that every team could choose however they worked. Both me and Théo took this very seriously. Théo already had entrepreneurship experience but I had, up to that point, never been in a leadership role. Both of us had to learn a great many things. There is quite a difference between being a contributor and leading the contributors. I would have to climb that steep slope.

Our Icon was the floppy disk. It started as an ironic joke, but it stuck.

We were team storage 💾.

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If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

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To pair with :

• Spoutmite (Live in goa) - Cosmyte
• The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoi