S6 E8: Killing the SSH Key: Building Identity-Native Cloud Access and a $1B Unicorn with Ev Kontsevoy of Teleport

From Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders Noah Labhart | Podcast for Technical Founders & Startups

Ev Kontsevoy wanted to be an engineer when he grew up, and this was directly influenced by his engineering parents. When he was younger, computers were relatively uncool still. But as they grew in popularity, he started to explore how to make computers do what he wanted them to do, specifically to interact with hardware. He recalls burning up a monitor once, because he was tinkering with changing the refresh rate, typing up assembly in DOS, and playing early games like Doom. Eventually, he got into infrastructure so he could serve engineers and stay close to the hardware. Fun fact about him - Ev enjoys to watch computers boot. Outside of tech, he likes to tinker with photography, but not digitally - he likes the old cameras, where you have to develop the pictures yourself. Prior to his current venture, Ev created Mailgun - one of the top transactional email platforms out there - which he eventually sold to Rackspace. During his time scaling Mailgun, and working for Rackspace, he started to feel the pain of logging into multiple cloud services - so much so, that he decided to consolidate these connections into a single platform. This is the creation story of Teleport.

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