Todd Smith: Infrastructure engineers avoid new tech to protect vesting equity
Todd Smith · Harnessing High-Performance Computing: Todd Smith’s Vision for OpnBook’s TAHO Infrastructure · Apr 29, 2025 · at 34:16
Todd Smith, co-founder and CEO of OpnBook, explains why the company relies on a top-down enterprise sales strategy rather than bottom-up developer adoption for its infrastructure software.
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“This product, right this product is very attractive, or more attractive, easier to sell from a top-down perspective today. It's new tech. It's brand new tech that so nobody is an expert leveraging this tech yet, and there's a lot of experts out there that are pretty comfortable there's a lot of experts out there that are pretty comfortable with the existing or legacy technologies in the infrastructure. Software space. They're making six-figure salaries. They probably have million-dollar equity packages that are, they're waiting to mature, and they're not looking to, they've got it all figured out. They're not looking to rock the boat too much. When product asks for more compute, they go ahead and build out that infrastructure software layer using the Legos that they currently have, right, to build that out. So They're not incentivized. They're disincentivized to introduce some new tech into their space.”
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