Young OSU grads` cloud computing company rocketed from startup

F E AT U R E S T O R Y
Young OSU grads’ cloud computing
company rocketed from startup to
acquisition target in almost no time
By Gregg Kleiner
alex polvi hails from a long line
of Beavers.
“My dad and all four of his brothers have engineering degrees from
OSU, and both my siblings are Beavers,” says Polvi, ’07, who grew up on
a Christmas Tree farm outside tiny
Amity, west of Salem. “There have
been 11 of us total so far, including
me, so the family joke is that the
next one should be free.”
Maybe so, but given Polvi’s recent
success as a technology entrepreneur
in Silicon Valley, he could probably
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afford to pick up the tuition tab for
the next dozen Beavers in his family.
Polvi, 25, teamed up with two
fellow Beavs — Dan Di Spaltro, ’07,
from Bend and Logan Welliver, ’06,
from McMinnville — to conceive,
cofound and ultimately sell their Silicon Valley startup called Cloudkick,
a company that develops software
tools used in cloud computing.
Polvi’s career trajectory — from
his first job running a chainsaw on
his family’s tree farm, through various student positions in computer
science at Oregon State, to being
CEO of the recently acquired startup — has been nothing short
of stratospheric.
Stratospheric seems a fitting term, because Cloudkick deals
with the stratosphere of cyberspace (cloud computing), and the
company was acquired last December for an undisclosed but substantial amount — just two years after the Beaver trio launched
it (moving from launch to acquisition in under two years is fast
even in fast-paced Silicon Valley).
Cloud computing lets customers use the Internet to tap server
space, software tools and other resources on demand, instead of
tying up capital to own computing power, servers and software
that are needed only at certain times. Cloudkick’s product is a set
of highly visual and easy-to-use tools that enables system administrators to better monitor, analyze and manage the resources they
use in their cloud, which might be scattered across the Internet.
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Polvi traces his entrepreneurial
success back to his time at Oregon State, where he met fellow
computer science major Di Spaltro
and graphic designer Welliver
(whose family counts a half-dozen
OSU alumni in its ranks), who
would later become his Cloudkick
cofounders, collaborators and ultimately cohabiters.
“The roots of Cloudkick are really
at OSU and the Oregon State Open
Source Lab,” says Polvi, who credits
Welliver and Di Spaltro for their incredible teamwork and talent while
all three of them built the company.
As a freshman, Polvi talked his
way into a student system administrator position at the Open Source
Lab after first being passed over
because — he thinks — he showed
up for the interview sporting tiedyed socks.
Scott Kveton, ’97, then Open
Source Lab director, took Polvi
under his wing and served as a mentor, leading him to an internship at
Google in New York, and then to a
real job at Mozilla in the Bay Area
SPRING 2011
after graduation.
It was at OSU where Polvi
worked with professor Tim Budd to
establish the Open Source Education Lab. “Tim taught me a whole
bunch,” Polvi says. “He was very
influential and a great mentor.”
Polvi also pulled off some
interesting antics on campus,
demonstrating both creativity and
audaciousness. One summer, he
worked with a small team of “fellow
geeks who were crazy about Mozilla”
to help create a massive crop circle
in a field of oats north of Corvallis
that depicted the web browser’s logo
(watch video: bit.ly/YITGZ). Also,
as part of a women’s studies class
project at OSU, he and two female
students briefly displayed above a
sidewalk on engineering row a wellforged banner featuring Sara Jean
Underwood — an OSU student
who had been selected Playmate
of the Year by Playboy Magazine —
among a collection of banners highlighting outstanding OSU alumni
and their achievements.
Polvi’s thirst for new experiences
Above: Cloudkick founder Alex Polvi spent part of one OSU summer helping
create a giant crop circle of the Firefox browser logo in an oat field north of
Corvallis. PHOTO COURTESY FLICKR
Top: Young alums Logan Welliver, left, and Dan Di Spaltro, right, founded the
company with fellow Beaver Polvi. PHOTO COURTESY CLOUDKICK
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meant that after a year with Mozilla,
he left to launch his own company. In
December 2008, Polvi, Di Spaltro, and
Welliver launched Cloudkick, another
of a seeming gazillion startups that
seem to sprout and wither each year in
the rich, high-tech compost that fills
Silicon Valley. But Cloudkick had a
solid product, and three smart cofounders who, as Polvi admits, got lucky.
In February of 2009, the company
was one of 16 selected by a unique
startup incubator called Y Combinator,
which gave the starving trio $20,000 in
cash, plus access to weekly mentoring
sessions with some of Silicon Valley’s
finest minds in exchange for a small
percentage interest in the company.
“Y Combinator is the brainchild of
Paul Graham, a luminary in the hacker
world,” Polvi says. “It’s a very different
— six of whom were fellow OSU
approach to venture funding, which
alumni — plus an intern working
usually involves much larger funds
remotely from the OSU campus.
focused on far fewer startups.”
Part of Cloudkick’s edge is that
The Y Combinator seed funding and its products are highly visual and
mentoring connections give a select
simple to use. The visual sophisticahandful of fledgling startups operattion is thanks to Welliver’s OSU
ing cash for three months, at the end
education in graphic design and the
of which they give a six-minute pitch
time he spend working as creative
about their company to a roomful of
director for a Portland web design
venture capitalists and Silicon Valley
firm before moving to the Bay Area
brass.
to join Polvi and Di Spaltro.
Polvi, Welliver and Di Spaltro
Di Spaltro and Polvi shared genstretched the cash to last eight months
eral management duties. “Dan was
while they scoured the Valley for fundresponsible for writing a lot of the
ing and further developed their product. software, managing the engineering
“It was 2009, a horrible time to be
team, working with big customers,
trying to raise money,” Polvi says. “And
dealing with investors and helping
we were a very inexperienced team
out partners,” Polvi says.
with no business background.”
On Dec. 15, 2010, exactly two
But in August 2009, as the trio was
years to the day from when they
running on financial fumes, they landed founded Cloudkick, Polvi, Di
a $750,000 investment from Avalon
Spaltro and Welliver closed the
Ventures. They all moved into a house
acquisition deal with Rackspace, the
in San Francisco that served as both
nation’s no. 2 player in cloud comhome and office, where the Beaver flag
puting (second only to Amazon)
was proudly flown, and they hired their
for an undisclosed but substantial
first employee, Paul Querna, who had
amount.
worked with the Oregon State Open
Although they can now all afSource Lab when he was vice president
ford to buy their own homes, Polvi
of infrastructure at the Apache Softdoesn’t own a car and the three
ware Foundation.
cofounders still live together in the
Six months later, in February 2010,
San Francisco house, which served
Avalon Ventures came forward with
as the Cloudkick office until the
another infusion of cash for Cloudcompany outgrew it and rented
kick — $2 million this time — a clear
space at The Farm, a former comindication that the OSU grads were on
munity center and organic farm that
to something big. Less than a year later, has a reputation for hosting punk
Cloudkick had grown to 12 employees
rock recording sessions.
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What’s next for Polvi? For the
near future, he’ll be working for
Welliver, Di Spaltro and
Rackspace, yet another new experiPolvi sit for a portrait
ence he’s pumped about jumping
in a studio at Cloudkick
into.
headquarters. PHOTO
“Part of the deal with Rackspace
COURTESY CLOUDKICK
was that they wanted a Bay Area
presence, so I’ll be managing the
opening of their San Francisco
office,” Polvi says, noting that it
will be nice to have access to the
resources at San Antonio, Texasbased Rackspace, which employs
3,500 people and is valued at
approximately $4 billion.
“Rackspace will be working to
secure its spot as a world leader in cloud computing,” says Polvi.
“And I’m excited about helping them get there.”
Beyond that, who knows? “I love new experiences that
ultimately help people,” he says. “At the end of the day, I think
that’s what it’s all about, helping people. That’s what we did at
Cloudkick, created a tool that helps people do their job better.
And that’s what I’ll be doing at Rackspace.”
One of the immediate ways Polvi hopes to help others is by
hiring more OSU alumni and interns at Rackspace’s new San
Francisco digs. “We’re hiring interns all the time, so if you want
to work with a bunch of other Beavers, get in touch,” he says,
acknowledging that the Beaver flag will definitely be flying at
the new office space.
“If you enjoy what you’re doing, work is life,” he says. q
Gregg Kleiner is a freelance writer based in Corvallis.
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