Balancing Priorities at the CNCF, with Priyanka Sharma

The Untold Stories of Open Source

Priyanka Sharma has had a long career in tech. After graduating from Stanford in 2009, she worked at Google in the Online Partnerships Group, was a technical consultant where she onboarded new DoubleClick clients, and acted as interim Product Manager for internal insights tools. From there she moved to OutRight, leading the promotional launch for the GoDaddy Silicon Valley office, and continued by leading the Outright product integration into the GoDaddy sales team catalog.

Priyanka noticed that her business partner had built a time tracking application for himself, and realized it might be useful addition to a developer tool kit when tracking time spent on specific project code.

By this rather unlikely set of events, she ended up getting into developer tools. Eventually the plugins were used by over 100,000 developers. It was featured at high visibility events such as TechCrunch Disrupt, and was chosen for Y Combinator.

There were challenges every day, as there is with any start-up, whether it comes to fundraising or getting the public visibility a company needs in order to get traction in the market. Getting into Y Combinar was a pivotal moment, forcing the team to come to terms with what it would take to work together, to make a real commitment to the project together, as a team. What looked great on the outside, however, didn’t account for the personality dynamics at play inside the company. It was decision time.

From the Linux Foundation office in New York City, this is “The Untold Stories of Open Source”. Each week we choose an open source project or a person behind a popular open source project, to uncover its untold stories. If you work with open source, and you do whether you know it or not, you’re in the right place.