Exiting in Silicon Valley: Derek Collison on Cloud Wars, Kubernetes, and Synadia

The Exit - Presented By Flippa

Technology

5.0 • 420 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Want a quick estimate of how much your business is worth? With our free valuation calculator, answer a few questions about your business and you’ll get an immediate estimate of the value of your business. You might be surprised by how much you can get for it: https://flippa.com/exit -- In this episode of The Exit: Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Synadia and previously Apcera and creator of Cloud Foundry, explores his storied career in tech, entrepreneurship, and building platforms that shaped modern cloud computing. From starting with a Commodore 64 at age 12 to working at Google, VMware, and founding Apcera—Derek shares how he turned distributed systems challenges into billion-dollar ideas. He unpacks the high-speed growth, fundraising challenges, and exit to Ericsson, before launching his latest venture, Synadia, built on the NATS open-source tech now downloaded over 300 million times. Derek opens up about: Getting into tech as a teenager in the 1980s Building Cloud Foundry at VMware after a call from Paul Maritz Starting Apcera and scaling to 150 employees in 12 months Navigating an acquisition by Ericsson amidst Kubernetes disruption How to survive the VC game: from seed to Series B His playbook for product-led platform companies and why most fail The emotional toll, decision-making pressure, and rewards of being a founder Why introverts need to lean in and chase serendipity How Synadia is powering AI at the edge, connected cars, and Industry 4.0 "Be humble, lean in, and don’t delay hard decisions" — Derek’s advice rings true for every founder navigating the speed and pressure of today’s tech ecosystem -- Derek Collison is a 30 year industry veteran, entrepreneur, and pioneer in secure and large-scale distributed systems and cloud computing. He helped change the way financial, transportation, and logistics systems fundamentally worked while spending over a decade at TIBCO, designing systems that still power much of those industries today. During his time at VMWare, Derek designed and architected CloudFoundry, the first open-source enterprise PaaS. He then founded Apcera, a company designed to drive security and policy into easy to use platform technologies. After the successful sale of Apcera to Ericsson, Derek took the messaging technology he designed to power the CloudFoundry and Apcera systems, NATS.io, and created Synadia. Synadia is pioneering secure and global messaging as a digital utility to help drive security and powerful communication and collaboration into IoT, edge, and cloud computing systems. Derek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekcollison/ Website: https://www.synadia.com/ -- The Exit—Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You’ll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we get into the exit today, I want to talk about the certified M&A advisors that are on
0:05.7	Flippa. If you are an operator right now running a business and you're thinking about exiting,
0:10.8	you are going to want to get a free online business valuation on the exit landing page.
0:16.7	Without a doubt, it is the smartest thing you can do to start a process and get yourself organized.
0:23.0	So you're going to go to the URL, flippa.com, slash exit, to check out more, and let's jump into
0:28.1	the interview.
0:29.2	Below and welcome to the exit presented by Flipup, the number one platform to buy and sell online
0:34.2	businesses.
0:35.2	Flipa manages over a billion in deal value annually and combines
0:39.4	expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool, deal room,
0:43.9	off market offering, market insights, an AI-based deal-by-deal matching engine. Now for the exit.
0:50.9	The exit is a 30-minute podcast featuring awesome entrepreneurs who have been there and they
0:54.8	have done it. The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different
0:59.7	sizes. You learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits.
1:04.7	It's a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. On this episode of The Exit, I sit down
1:10.7	with Derek Collison, the founder and
1:12.4	CEO of Sinadia and the creator of Nats. This is a fantastic, wide-ranging conversation where we
1:19.2	talk not only about his exit of the company, App Serra, but his background at Google and all
1:24.5	of the incredible things that he has done over the last decade or two.
1:29.7	And one of my favorite parts of this conversation comes towards the end.
1:32.5	If you guys listen through all the way to the end, there's a key part that Derek mentions,
1:37.4	and it's about what it means to be a CEO.
	...

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