Friday was my last day at Golioth (and Canonical), and today is my first day at Nordic Semiconductor! It has been an interesting journey to say the least, but before diving into what drew me to Nordic, I would be remiss not to briefly reflect on my time at Golioth.

I joined Golioth after a few years at Upbound, where I spent the majority of my time working on the open source Crossplane project, before eventually moving over to lead teams that built Upbound Cloud and the Upbound Marketplace. It was a tremendous experience, but I found myself spending more and more time working with FPGAs, learning about chip design, and generally gravitating towards hardware. I knew that no matter how great Upbound was, I wanted to be “closer to the metal”. I had known Jonathan for a few years, and I finally decided to take a leap of faith and join him and the team at Golioth to begin that journey.

Though I was coming from a startup background and was very comfortable with “wearing all the hats”, Golioth took that philosophy to a new level. We built scalable cloud systems ingesting large volumes of data from embedded devices all over the world. We wrote firmware SDKs that ran on countless variations of microcontrollers and supported multiple real-time operating systems. We designed reference hardware for our customers and helped them adapt it to their own specific requirements. In a given day, I could be deploying new cloud infrastructure, testing the impact of a firmware change on cellular connectivity, reviewing a board schematic, and more. As someone who has no shortage of interests, this was truly a joy.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of working on Golioth was the management and leadership responsibilities that were entrusted to me. While I had lead teams of engineers in the past, I eventually stepped into the CTO role at Golioth, making me the final decision maker on and ultimately responsible for all technical direction and engineering personnel matters. Fortunately, I was surrounded by a group of highly experienced engineers, and more importantly, excellent people, who extended grace to me as I grew into the role. While I am as hands on as they come when it comes to technical leadership, some of the best experiences I had at Golioth were managing difficult non-technical situations with members of the team, whether related to mistakes that we had made, or external factors that constrained our resources. While my tenure was by no means flawless, I do feel confident that we treated every member of the team with respect and always operated with their best interests at heart. I hope they also feel as though that was the case.

At the beginning of 2026 we entered into an agreement to be acquired by Canonical. The months leading up to that decision were the hardest of my professional life. I spent less time building and much more time in meetings, many of which involved navigating constraints and determining what the best outcome would look like for the company and the team. I learned a ton during this period, and we were incredibly fortunate to have Jonathan at the helm. I had the luxury of knowing that Jonathan and I were aligned in our values, and though it was a difficult time for me personally, he shouldered the vast majority of the load. Many of them will never be shared publicly, but the sacrifices that were made during that time were far beyond what most would consider reasonable or expected.

Landing at Canonical was an adjustment. While still a relatively small company, Canonical is two orders of magnitude larger than what our headcount was at Golioth. Though some have now moved on to new opportunities, I felt proud that the entire team was willing to join the new adventure, and came in with fairly open minds despite non-ideal circumstances. If anything, having the opportunity to observe the Golioth team within the context of the Canonical organization reinforced the high caliber technical acumen and uncompromising character of each individual to me. I’m grateful to Canonical for taking a chance on our small team, and I’m grateful to our team for taking a chance on a different path than we expected. I remain incredibly optimistic about the technical direction of the Golioth team, as well as its sibling teams, within Canonical.

Shortly after joining Golioth, I wrote a blog post entitled A Three Year Bet on Chip Design. While I failed to follow through on some of the goals enumerated in that post, I have learned more about chip design, and hardware manufacturing generally, than I could have hoped for in the past three years. Some of that was through our own work at Golioth, while other experience came through interaction with customers and partners, many of whom were semiconductor companies. This has only reinforced my passion for the space and my desire to be a technical leader at the “lowest level” of the stack.

One partner that we interacted with on a regular basis was Nordic Semiconductor. If I were to describe our relationship with Nordic in a single statement, it would be: “our customers love them.” And by proxy, we loved working with customers who were building devices on Nordic silicon. If you have spent any time in the embedded space, you know that Nordic is a leader not only in low-power communication chips (first Bluetooth and now cellular and Wi-Fi), but is perhaps the most sophisticated hardware company when it comes to software. From their early investment in the Zephyr project, to providing countless development tools and robust documentation, Nordic consistently raises the bar for what it looks like for a semiconductor company to provide software support to their customers (and even so, I believe that bar can and should be much much higher).

Nordic also made a shrewd decision in June 2025 to acquire Memfault. Golioth and Memfault have been both partners and friendly competitors for the past few years, during which we developed a great appreciation for one another. Through our interactions, I had the opportunity to form relationships with a number of folks on the Memfault team, and, given my aforementioned deep respect for the Golioth team, the highest complement I can give them is that they seem like they would all fit in perfectly at Golioth (and vice versa). Not only does the acquisition signal that Nordic has good taste in teams and technology, it also means that I’ll have the opportunity to work alongside these incredible folks starting today!

While it certainly hasn’t been a straight line, the decision to join Nordic is a fairly obvious continuation of the journey I began with my last “leap of faith”. I’ll be spending more time focusing on chip-level functionality and how capabilities introduced in silicon can enable new products, features, and experiences in firmware and software. I am particularly excited about the opportunity to make connected devices more secure, observable, and reliable, and I believe that Nordic is uniquely positioned to improve the posture of all three through its involvement in every layer of stack, even if a customer doesn’t choose to utilize its capabilities at every layer.

I’ll have many more Nordic blog posts coming in the future; I’ve already written a fair amount about their our chips over the last few years. For now, I want to extend by deepest thanks to Ariana, Brian, Chris, Dylan, Gary, Marcin, Marko, Mike, Sam, Trond, and of course Jonathan. You are the best of the best, and working with you has been a privilege.

And with that… let’s build something great this week!