Tom Wilkie’s Path to CTO at Grafana Labs: Startups, Pivots, and Perseverance

Tom Wilkie, the CTO of Grafana Labs, talks to us about his professional journey. We cover how he got into software engineering, his first startup, working as an EM at Google, and what motivated him to go back to an IC role. We talk about his time at Grafana from when they were only 25 people to now when Grafana Labs has more than a thousand employees. Tom’s journey cannot be told without diving deeper into the technical side of things - we discuss observability, distributed systems, and hard technical problems.

Where to find more about Tom and Grafana Labs:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomwilkie

- X - https://x.com/tom_wilkie

- Grafana Labs - https://grafana.com/

- Grafana Labs events - https://grafana.com/events/

Where to find Bartek:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/

- X - https://x.com/bwplotka

Where to find Ivan:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-valkov/

- X - https://x.com/ivvalkov

As always, feedback and questions are welcome! You can use this form -https://forms.gle/NmUGeqMtyP6H6mMP9

0:00 - Tom’s intro

7:09 - How Tom got into software engineering

15:05 - Tom’s first startup 21:25 - Tom’s experience as EM at Google

28:04 - Joining Weaveworks as employee number 7

38:51 - Tom joining Grafana

45:32 - Grafana’s Third Act

53:12 - Startup advice

59:41 - Perseverance and motivation

1:04:35 - How Grafana acquires startups

1:10:25 - Where to find out more