I’ve written many “why we’re investing in XYZ newco” blogs over the years. They usually follow a familiar formula: there’s a massive pain point, a technological shift, a big market, an awesome team, and—these days—sprinkle in some AI and voilà, aren’t we smart?
But with Encoded, there is no “we.” It’s just me—and I wanted to take a different tack.
My journey in configuration automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) began in 2010, when Battery led the Series B in Chef (then known as Opscode). It would probably be called an A round today. The company was very early-stage: it had a growing open-source user base and community, but close to zero revenue. Battery had context here, having previously invested in BladeLogic, who battled Opsware for supremacy in the prior generation of tools in this domain. When Sunil left to start Amplify, I took over the board seat at Chef, where I served until its acquisition by Progress Software in 2020.
In that early DevOps era, we did what good VCs do: trade on the brand and reputation of our portfolio companies to immerse ourselves in the community and market. Adam, Jesse, and Chris had our backs. I was at the early Velocity conferences, the Chef after-parties, the Surge Conference, and the first wave of DevOpsDays. Good times. I got to hang with the practitioners and hear firsthand the stories about 10 deployments a day at Flickr, or GitHub making router config changes via Slack. The relationships built during this period directly led to—or heavily influenced—many other investments across the stack: CDNs, database monitoring, APM, synthetic testing, on-call operations, SRE, and even security tooling for IaC.
Through that network, I met—and ultimately worked alongside—Adrian Cockcroft, who originally introduced me to Alexis Richardson. Alexis was just starting WeaveWorks at the time and is now CEO of ConfigHub. Over the years, Alexis and I had a few conversations. I was always impressed with his technical and product acumen, as well as his experience from RabbitMQ, VMware/Pivotal, and his role in launching the CNCF. Still, Battery never invested.
Coming full circle it was Adam Jacob—founder of Chef and now System Initiative—who reconnected me with Alexis as Confighub was getting off the ground. Confighub became the second investment made by Encoded. With nearly 15 years of context in this space, the decision was easy. The benefit of having been in the game for a minute is that context and relationships compound.
I didn’t know Brian or Jesper beforehand, but that changed quickly. I certainly knew of Brian—from the CNCF, Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes. He’s a true full-stack (distributed) systems thinker: what I call someone who really knows how computers work. Folks like this are becoming increasingly rare, as abstraction continues to pile on top of infrastructure—but they still matter. A lot. After a conversation about debugging Transmeta code morphing and programming GPUs before CUDA existed, I knew I wanted to work with him.
Jesper came with some of the strongest references I’ve ever gotten—from Heroku’s CEO to the ops team. Having led product at the company that, to this day, built the best abstraction between developers and infrastructure, Jesper has uncanny insight into this problem space. He brings a rare combination of technical depth, product thinking, and leadership.
So, we’ve got a team that’s been at the center of three of the most impactful software movements of the last decade: GitOps, Heroku/PAAS, and Kubernetes. The market itself—DevOps, Platform Engineering, shared services, whatever you want to call it—hasn’t yet delivered on its promise, but it’s still fertile ground. Startups over the last 20 years have shown that meaningful impact and real equity value can be built here. Now sprinkle on top a possible future of agentic technical operators—DevOps, SREs, and SOC analysts. Well, at the start of this post I said I wouldn’t frame it this way. But I guess old habits die hard.
Excited to be part of the ConfigHub journey alongside my friends at Crane and Pear.
Read more about the ConfigHub launch here
