Posted on March 03, 2022

Meet the Crew: Ashlynn Pericacho and John May

Over the last few months, Okteto has hit several exciting milestones. Along with recently raising Series A funding, the team has been thriving and growing into new departments to help expand the business, product, brand and community. We’re very excited to welcome two new leaders to the Okteto team.

Here are a few words from them on why they joined Okteto....

Ashlynn Pericacho, Head of Marketing

The team. Plain and simple, we are assembling an all-star team of developer tools experts and I can’t imagine a better group to tackle this next chapter of development-focused innovation. I’m inspired by the diversity of our backgrounds and experiences each of us bring to the table. The team is made up of seasoned industry veterans from Microsoft, Atlassian, Google, Docker, GitLab and Netlify and others with fresh perspectives either early in their careers or breaking into the DevOps or Cloud Native space. Each one of us is hungry to build impactful tools that change the development experience. That combination of growth experience, drive and alignment is powerful.

I’ve been extremely lucky in my career to work with such talented groups of people, both early at Docker and then Netlify. I still pinch myself in disbelief that I’ve found another home at Okteto that feels like the same magical team vibes are brewing.

The second part I couldn’t pass up was the opportunity in front of Okteto to revolutionize how developers work. I joined Docker in 2014 and was fortunate to play an impactful role in bringing containers mainstream with a massive community. As most know, Docker didn’t create containers, but they made it effortless to ship code and revolutionized a new standard of deployment. At the end of the day, it made developer and DevOps jobs easier and innovation was more tangible and that led to massive adoption.

I see the same opportunity for Okteto. We aren’t creating a new technology - remote development environments have existed for a long time. What we are championing is a new development experience that doesn’t revolve around limitations of a developer’s local machine, but rather pushing forward development that happens in the cloud, free of the complexities that now come with building modern, cloud-native applications. The result is a smooth development experience for entire engineering teams coding in ephemeral, scalable, reliant dev environments as close to production as possible. That’s the new standard we’re after.

I’m excited to be part of this journey and to help foster the growth of the business, the community and the Okteto team behind it. We’re hiring, so if any of this gets you excited...let’s talk!

John May, Head of Sales

Starting back in 2006, working at Rally Software, we introduced a new way of project management called agile. Agile took off and Rally grew exponentially. I was able to work with some top clients such as Cisco, eBay/PayPal and even Microsoft to adopt agile. Agile then led to different needs for software delivery. This led me to GitLab which was helping solve the problem of Cloud-Based application delivery and having the opportunity to be involved with large, early adopter companies such as Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, Verizon and Dell. Seeing these company’s journeys was exciting to watch as they transformed themselves to being cloud-native first. During my time at GitLab, we saw the company valuation go from $200 million in 2016 to over $5 billion and an IPO in 2021.

I was then fortunate to join a rocket ship startup called Remote which was founded by an ex-GitLab VP to help companies hire on a global basis. We built a sales team from the ground up at Remote starting with minimal sales. In 16 months, we became one of the fastest-growing startups in our investor's portfolio. Sales grew 2000% in the first 4 months and had a goal of 10X for the next year where we exceeded it by 50%. We also raised our Series B round at a $1b valuation. Growing and building a team to that size showed me what is needed for hyper-growth.

Now, along comes Okteto to help Developers match the speed and need for cloud-based development environments. It was a natural choice to come to Okteto as I see it as the next wave in software development that was started a long time ago with agile at Rally and improved via DevOps at GitLab. I look forward to helping Okteto become the third company in a row to make it to Unicorn status. We're hiring across the sales org. Check out the open jobs or reach out if you're interested in helping Okteto scale.