S1E15: Building the Easy Button for Edge with Cole Crawford

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Jacob Smith, VP of Bare Metal Strategy and Marketing at Equinix, and Cole Crawford, CEO and Founder of Vapor IO.

Cole is also the co-founder of the Open 19 Foundation, founding Executive Director of the Open Compute Project, former Chairman of the Open Data Center Alliance, and co-founder of OpenStack.

In this interview, Cole lays out his vision for creating the world’s first intelligent, hyper-modular data center solution, and how Vapor is fixing the fundamental architectural problems of the internet.

Key Quotes:

“The internet is still fundamentally broken today if you want to solve for autonomous robotics or autonomous driving or the future state of remote surgery…I think there are ways in which we can enhance the internet that we've built and make it better.”

“If you look back through every successful company, every big dot com, every big Silicon Valley startup, one of the things that they did really well—what ends up being the killer app for everything is economics and the easy button. If you can make it faster, better, cheaper, and you make it easy to consume, you're going to do well. That’s the mission that Vapor is on– to fix the architectural issues with the guts of the internet.”

“I think there are three things [that open hardware does]: lower the technical barrier of entry on the technical front, you increase the pace of innovation, and you democratize or commoditize those things that really have no value.”


Links:

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Cole on  Twitter