From the Canyon Edge: gazzangbang

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Gazzang Bang and the SXSW Startup Pub Crawl

The Gazzang office at 502 Baylor Street in Austin, Texas is one of the destinations of the 2012 SXSW Startup Pub Crawl, on Thursday, March 8th.

Join us between 4 and 10 pm for an open house, drum circle, and some awesome live music from the Lost Pines bluegrass band! Please RSVP here. Come talk to us over free beer and food about Cloud security, data privacy, encryption, eCryptfs, key management, Linux, and Ubuntu. Meet the entire cast of the Sh*t IT Security Guys Say short film. And tap into the vibrant tech start-up culture that's rocking downtown Austin by day, juxtaposed against the awesome live music culture that rocks downtown Austin by night.

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Come get your bang on!

:-Dustin

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Gazzang Bang!

With my friends and former colleagues sprinting in Budapest at Ubuntu's Distro Rally, I already miss our nightly Ubuntu All-Stars jam sessions :-( It was always such a great outlet for creativity and right-brain activity, after long days devoted to left-brain engineering work. I think some of my best memories over the last four years are jamming with Tony, Pete, Amber, Jorge, Matt, Hugh, Luke, Jono, Barry, and countless others!

Searching for some of the same camaraderie and revelry, we at Gazzang have formed our own band -- Gazzang Bang! And remarkably, we actually got a byline of press coverage and a band portrait in our local Austin American Statesman newspaper this weekend! The article was actually about the background of some of the funny/silly/unusual names of current Austin tech start-ups, of which Gazzang was one (along with Infochimps, Springbox, and UShip).

As you can see, we're a little drum-heavy at the moment (hence, the Bang part of the name). However, we do have a few job openings in Austin, Texas, (Senior Security Software Engineer, Director of Information Security) -- special preference given to keyboardists and vocalists! ;-)

:-Dustin

About the Author

Dustin Kirkland (Twitter, LinkedIn) is an engineer at heart, with a penchant for reducing complexity and solving problems at the cross-sections of technology, business, and people.

With a degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M University (2001), his full-time career began as a software engineer at IBM in the Linux Technology Center working on the Linux kernel and security certifications, including a one-year stint as an dedicated engineer-in-residence at Red Hat in Boston (2005). Dustin was awarded the title Master Inventor at IBM, in recognition of his prolific patent work as an inventor and reviewer with IBM's intellectual property attorneys.

Dustin then first joined Canonical (2008) as an engineer (eventually, engineering manager), helping create the Ubuntu Server distribution and establishing Ubuntu as the overwhelming favorite Linux distribution in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's cloud platforms, as well as authoring and maintaining dozens of new open source packages.

Dustin joined Gazzang (2011), a venture-backed start-up built around an open source project that he co-authored (eCryptFS), as Chief Technology Officer, and helped dozens of enterprise customers encrypt their data at rest and securely manage their keys. Gazzang was acquired by Cloudera (2014).

Having effectively monetized eCryptFS as an open source project at Gazzang, Dustin returned to Canonical (2013) as the VP of Product for Ubuntu and spent the next several years launching a portfolio of products and services (Ubuntu Advantage, Extended Security Maintenance, Canonical Livepatch, MAAS, OpenStack, Kubernetes) that continues to deliver considerable annual recurring revenue. With Canonical based in London, an 800+ work-from-home employee roster and customers spread across 40+ countries, Dustin traveled the world over, connecting with clients and colleagues steeped in rich cultural experiences.

Google Cloud (2018) recruited Dustin from Canonical to product manage Google's entrance into on-premises data centers with its GKE On-Prem (now, Anthos) offering, with a specific focus on the underlying operating system, hypervisor, and container security. This work afforded Dustin a view deep into the back end data center of many financial services companies, where he still sees tremendous opportunities for improvements in security, efficiencies, cost-reduction, and disruptive new technology adoption.

Seeking a growth-mode opportunity in the fintech sector, Dustin joined Apex Clearing (now, Apex Fintech Solutions) as the Chief Product Officer (2019), where he led several organizations including product management, field engineering, data science, and business partnerships. He drastically revamped Apex's product portfolio and product management processes, retooling away from a legacy "clearing house and custodian", and into a "software-as-a-service fintech" offering instant brokerage account opening, real-time fractional stock trading, a secure closed-network crypto solution, and led the acquisition and integration of Silver's tax and cost basis solution.

Drawn back into a large cap, Dustin joined Goldman Sachs (2021) as a Managing Director and Head of Platform Product Management, within the Consumer banking division, which included Marcus, and the Apple and GM credit cards. He built a cross-functional product management community and established numerous documented product management best practices, processes, and anti-patterns.

Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim and their wonderful two daughters.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Gazzang Bang and the SXSW Startup Pub Crawl

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Gazzang Bang!

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