Interview with Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs
When looking for inspiration for a new company it is often helpful to look for successes in related technologies. That is exactly what Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, did when he was looking to find a better way of managing IT resources and infrastructure. Luke learned a lesson from the transition from low level assembly languages to high level abstracted languages like C to inspire a language for managing and maintaining IT infrastructure. Puppet is an open source data center automation tool and configuration management framework for system administrators.
Puppet Labs is an up and coming company funded by True Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and is having tremendous adoption across a variety of industries. Certainly they are a good company to keep an eye on.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, it is helpful to look a how other technologies have solved problems and see if those same lessons can be applied in a new way to create a new product or company.
The Interview
Stats
HQ:
Portland, OR
Capital raised:
$7.25 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, Radar Partners, Emerson Street Partners, and other private investors.
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Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Olson. I'm the founder of FounderBuzz, and I'm here today with Luke Kanies, founder of Puppet Labs. Thanks for being with us, Luke.
Luke: Thank you for having me.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. This month we're focusing on the inspiration for products and companies from different founders. We would love to hear what the inspiration was for Puppet.
Luke: The main inspiration was the transition that happened in the '60s and '70s from assembly code to C or to high-level languages like C. I've been saying for a long time that your infrastructure is code. It's one big application. But the big problem was that it's not a portable application. It's assembly coded. If you wanted to change your computers or your organization or your location, you kind of have to throw that infrastructure application away. In looking at this and trying to figure out how could we build a tool to solve this, I realized that the analogy of the move from assembly language to high-level languages was really an appropriate analogy for the move that I wanted to shift. So, in Puppet, I tried to build a high-level language, a high-level tool, with the same kind of abstractions that go on in C. When you write a code now, you don't think about registers. You don't think about where the spindle of the hard drive is. You don't think about what the pipeline is in the CPU. You just think, I want an array, I want a string, I want a hash. Puppet is all about giving you those same high-level constructs, the constructs you, as a system admin, want to work with. That was really my inspiration.
Scott: So, applying lessons learned from development on building code to system admin problems, same kind of abstraction.
Luke: Exactly.
Scott: Okay. Well, that's great. Appreciate it, and best of luck with Puppet Labs.
FounderBuzz is the work of Scott Olson, President of MindLink Marketing. MindLink Marketing specializes in working with startups to provide strategic and web marketing services. Stop by the MindLink site for some great tips on marketing strategy, great marketing content, leads management and more – www.mindlinkmarketing.com
FounderBuzz is the work of Scott Olson, President of MindLink Marketing. MindLink Marketing specializes in working with startups to provide strategic and web marketing services. Stop by the MindLink site for some great tips on marketing strategy, great marketing content, leads management and more – 
