Kyle Forster

Co-Founder

London, England, United Kingdom24 yrs experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Founder of a pioneering AI SRE platform.
Led a successful acquisition in Software Defined Networking.
Extensive experience in product management across tech giants.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS and Networking expert with a strong focus on product management and engineering leadership.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Ai SreProduct ManagementSoftware Defined NetworkingProject Management

Other Skills

AutomationEngineering ManagementAIOperations ManagementData Center NetworkingCloud ComputingNetworkingProduct DevelopmentSales ManagementDesignStrategyStrategic PlanningSoftware DevelopmentBusiness StrategyCisco Technologies

About

Founder/CEO of RunWhen; A platform to build Engineering Assistants that handle the keep-the-lights-on work that every engineering team would automate if they had the time. RunWhen automates repetitive operations tasks 100x faster than traditional automation. Its AI-powered search surfaces the most logical next steps in response to alerts, tickets and chat prompts. Industry benchmarks today show that the traditional “Alerts to Tickets” process costs $500-700/ticket, but with RunWhen you can expect $5-7 – 1/100th The Cost. ------------------------------------------------ Before: Senior Director at Google, Application Modernization (Kubernetes). Before: Founder of Big Switch Networks, a pioneer in Software Defined Networking, – sold to Arista in Feb 2020. Before: Product Management and Strategy at Cisco for WLAN controller products, Cisco Security Gateway for Cellular/WLAN convergence. Before: Product Management at Microsoft, Member of four person strategic planning team in a $1b / 200 person Microsoft Exchange team. I gravitate to people and products that I think have the potential for broad industry impact.

Experience

24 yrs

Total Experience

4 yrs

Average Tenure

4 yrs 9 mos

Current Experience

Runwhen

Founder / CEO

Jul 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 9 mos · San Francisco Bay Area · Hybrid

AI SRE platform deployed at large scale by Fortune 50 enterprises. Winner, Gartner “Cool Vendors in AI SRE.”
As dev teams start shipping 20%+ faster, what are SRE leaders going to do? Some are piling on headcount. Some are funding more dashboards. They are fragmenting expertise, increasing MTTR and solving the WRONG problem.
The right problem to solve is figuring out how any engineer can handle any issue in any part of the stack. Superhumans required? Yes!
Let's build that together.
Built on the industry’s largest AI SRE tools library - https://registry.runwhen.com/all-tasks.

AI SREAutomationEngineering ManagementProduct Management

Google

Sr Director, Kubernetes

Apr 2020 – Jul 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos · Sunnyvale, California, United States

Worked with great people in and around the Kubernetes ecosystem while professionally sheltering in place.

Big switch networks

Founder

Feb 2010 – Feb 2020 · 10 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area

Founder of Big Switch Networks, a pioneer in Software Defined Networking, acquired by Arista in Feb 2020.
The company built data center networking products inspired by Google's Project Andromeda and Microsoft's Project DeMON, and was the first in the networking industry to bring cloud-style VPCs to on-prem data centers.
Led nearly every function at different times in the company's journey from early academic research through a 4 year R&D cycle, on to a global team with $70M+ in sales and then an acquisition by Arista Networks.

Software Defined NetworkingData Center NetworkingCloud ComputingProduct Management

Joost

VP, Product Management and Design

Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 · 2 yrs

Led the product management and design function at Joost, an early player in TV-over-the-internet services that leveraged peer-to-peer networking for high quality, full length broadcast TV content. Founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (Skype, KaZaa) and funded by Sequoia, Index and CBS/Viacom.

Product ManagementDesign

Cisco systems

Product Management / Strategy

Jan 2004 – Jan 2007 · 3 yrs

Held a variety of Product Management and Strategy Roles, including technical assistant for the SVP of Routing, Product Manager for $100m portfolio of WLAN controller products, Product Manager for Cisco Security Gateway for Cellular/WLAN convergence.

Product ManagementStrategy

Microsoft

Product Management

Jan 2003 – Jan 2003 · 0 mo

Product Manager in $1b / 200 person Microsoft Exchange team. Member of four person strategic planning team. Wrote the first PRD for Microsoft Exchange for voicemail.

Product ManagementStrategic Planning

Scient corporation

Developer/Engineering Manager/Project Leader

Jan 1999 – Jan 2002 · 3 yrs

Co-founded Scient's mobile application practice, Engineering manager for Scient Rapid Prototyping Environment (50 person cross-functional team), Software Developer.
In first five in entering class to be promoted to Senior Associate. First in class and youngest in company promoted to Project Lead.

Software DevelopmentProject Management