E12 – Kolton Andrus – Gremlin – Part 1 of 3

Kolton Andrus – CEO and Co-founder of Gremlin, a company that breaks IT systems on purpose to make them stronger. Gremlin is just 3 years old and has already raised $27 million in investment. We talk about how Kolton worked his way through all sorts of jobs before he got into tech, a formative tour of duty in Amazon, Netflix and Chaos Monkey, how the flu shot relates to chaos engineering, why one ‘breaks’ systems to make them better, having 5 kids, being a gamer, microservices, and little green monsters in World War 2. “The Gremlin is something that came to be in world war 2, the pilots were talking about these little green monsters on their planes, breaking their engines. And this exact idea of these little green monsters breaking your machinery, that’s what Gremlin’s about.” This interview with Stephen Cummins took place in New Orleans in Collision in 2018.