Why I left Arista Networks

edit: I rejoined Arista Networks in early 2020 ;)
5 years ago, I wrote a blog post on why I joined Arista Networks back in 2012.  As I am now suddenly and unexpectedly leaving the company, I figured I'd write a bit of a retrospective and perhaps bring some closure to this otherwise fairly quiet blog.  I know that the original blog post has been used by candidates considering to join Arista, and even though I didn't write it with this in mind originally, I wanted to give a bit of an update to those considering to join the company in 2018 and beyond.

Why I left Arista

I was very happy and thriving at Arista and wasn't looking for a change.  But I guess change was looking for me and somehow managed to convince me to join a new startup as co-founder.  I won't say much more on that topic for now but it's one of those opportunities that was too big to pass up on.  It's not in the networking industry, so not competitive with Arista.

I really struggled with this change, it took some massive amount of questioning things to accept the idea to leave such a great company, with a great team, working on great projects, to throw myself into the unknown and push myself way outside of my comfort zone.  But I felt like I had to try, I had to seize this opportunity.

Arista in 2018

Everything that I wrote in my original blog post is still true as far as I'm concerned.  The big difference is that in the meantime Arista has established itself as one of the truly remarkable success stories in recent Silicon Valley history.

Now “Arista Networks” may not be a household name like Google or Facebook, but make no mistake, Arista's success in the networking industry is on the same track as Google's success in search or Facebook's success in social media.

Many others have tried (or are trying) to claim a piece of the networking cake dominated by Cisco, and I really cannot think of any other company succeeding in any meaningful way in that space.  If anything, previously established players have all but disappeared (e.g. Force10, Brocade) or become largely irrelevant (e.g. Extreme).  As the two remaining industry giants, Cisco and Juniper, are tumbling, steadily losing market share and focus, the brightest rising star in the datacenter networking industry has been Arista.  And yet Arista still only commands a low double digit market share, so there is a lot of room to grow further while also strategically expanding the TAM (Total Addressable Market).

There are a number of tailwinds benefiting the company:

• Competitors still can't get their act together and continue to overpromise and underdeliver.  Quality issues continue to plague them.  Arista manages its roadmap carefully and will not hesitate to say "no" to a customer if they cannot commit to what the customer is asking for, rather than promise something that they know cannot be delivered on time or at all.  Quality remains paramount and the team is constantly trying to improve automated testing processes to ensure that every new release that comes out is better than the previous one and that no regression sneaks back into the code.  This includes things like automatically running tests based on what code changed by leveraging code-coverage information gleaned during earlier test runs, automatically triaging and root-causing unexplained test failures, and more.  There is a strong emphasis on building/improving tools and creating a development environment where everyone can be productive [1].
• The routing industry is collapsing in the datacenter networking industry. This trend started a couple years ago and should by now be clear to anybody in the industry.  The gap between a "switch" and a "router" has been shrinking steadily to the point that we now commonly see datacenter switches play the role of edge peering boxes, backbone routers, cross-datacenter interconnects, etc.  This is hurting Juniper particularly bad, because this space was their bread and butter.  But with the wrong hardware and the wrong software, they cannot compete with the density and cost per port of commodity hardware.  The only lead they kept, and mostly the only differences that remain between switches and routers, are in specialized routing software.  And since Arista is a software company, not a hardware company, the team has been hard at work to implement routing features and scale the routing code way beyond what has ever been done on datacenter networking platforms.  This is probably one of the biggest boost to Arista's TAM and much work remains to be done in that space to close that gap fully.  It's very exciting.
• Arista has been leading innovation in the networking industry. Whenever a new chip comes out, Arista is often the first to make it bridge a packet, sometimes before the chip vendor has done it themselves.  On many occasions, Arista has managed to push the hardware at a scale that exceeds the data sheet of the underlying hardware.  This is only made possible by Arista's edge on the software front.  Furthermore, Arista has influenced chip design with the silicon vendors they partner with to further widen the gap between the cost/performance of commodity hardware and vendor-proprietary ASICs like those designed at great cost by Cisco and Juniper.  Arista has been leading industry standards like 25/50G and more recently 200/400G, with the new OSFP initiative.  Arista was the first to take to market new technologies like VXLAN, internet-scale routing in a sub-$20k 1RU top of rack switch, streaming telemetry and network programmability, etc.
• Arista's execution has been flawless.  The company faced some pretty serious challenges, including a set of massive lawsuits from the 800 pound gorilla with a virtually unlimited legal budget that would stop at nothing to slow them down or tarnish their image.  Despite all this, the company kept its head down and its focus, fought fearlessly for what was right, and managed to deliver 14 consecutive "beat and raise" quarters that turned it into a Wall Street darling.  This is really a function of the amazing exec team that has been at the helm of the company.
• Arista is in the segment of the networking industry that is growing the fastest. There are a lot of products and areas in the overall networking industry but datacenter networking is the one growing the fastest, because everything is going to the cloud, and the cloud runs on this stuff.  Arista has managed to remain laser focused on this specific segment of the industry, slowly expanding into connected areas where opportunities existed to go after some low hanging fruits (e.g. tap aggregation, routing, and more).  Arista is present at a large scale in virtually all the major cloud environments out there.  Again, the name might not quite have the mindshare of a Google or a Facebook, but these days it's virtually impossible to use the Internet without going through Arista devices.

And while the headcount has more than quintupled since I joined, the company has managed to remain surprisingly apolitical and bullshit-free.  There have been growing pains, for sure, and it's not like everything is perfect and just happy rainbow unicorns either, but the company culture is essentially unchanged, and that's what actually matters.

So it was really, really, really freaking hard to say goodbye.  I've been lucky to be very happy everywhere I worked in my career, but to this point Arista has been by far the best company I've worked at.

So... As Douglas Adams would say: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

[1] A footnote worthwhile adding regarding the emphasis on tooling.  Ken Duda, one of the co-founders, is very involved in developer tools.  After becoming a Go fanboy he spent months working on a new way to put together development workspaces using Docker containers.  There are several people working with him on this new tool now and it has become the de-facto standard way of managing Arista's massive workspaces, which comprise millions of lines of code and often need to pull in tens of gigabytes of stuff.  This has saved everybody a lot of time and helped support / enable changes to the CI (Continuous Integration) workflow.

Additional disclaimer for this post: the views expressed in this blog are my own, and Arista didn't review/approve/endorse anything I wrote here.

Why I joined Arista Networks

Over the past few months, many people have asked me why I jumped from the "web world" to the "network industry" to work at Arista Networks.  I asked myself this question more than once, and it was a bit of a leap of faith, but here's why I did it, and why I'm happy I did it.

Choosing a company to work for

There is a negative unemployment rate in Silicon Valley provided you know how to type on a keyboard.  It's ridiculous, but all the tech companies are hiring like there's no tomorrow.  So needless to say, when the time came to make a move, I had too many options available to me.  It's not easy to decide where you'll want to spend the next X years of your life.

My #1 requirement for my next job was to work with great people.  This was ranking above salary, likelihood of company success, and possibly even location (although I really wanted to try to stay in SF).  I wanted to feel like I felt when I was at Google, when I could look around me, and assume all these engineers I didn't know were smarter than me, because most of them were.  I could have returned to Google too, but I was in for something new.

I quickly wound up with 3 really good offers.  One from CloudFlare, who's coming to kick the butt of the big CDNs, one from Twitter, which you know already, and one from this datacenter networking company called Arista.  The first two were to work on interesting, large-scale distributed systems.  But the last one was different.

Why did I interview with Arista?

So why did I decide to interview with Arista in the first place?  In November 2010, I was shopping for datacenter networking gear to rebuild an entire network from scratch.  I heard about Arista and quickly realized that their switches and software architecture was exactly what I'd been looking for the previous year already (since I left Google basically).  We ended up buying Arista and I was a happy customer for about 2 years, until I joined them.

I don't like to interact with most vendors.  Most of them want to take you out to lunch or ball games or invite you at useless events to brainwash you with sales pitches.  But my relationship with Arista was good, the people we were interacting with on the sales and SE side were absolutely stellar.  In April 2011, they invited me to an event they regularly hold, a "Customer Exchange", at their HQ.  I wasn't convinced this would make a good use of my time, but I decided to give it a shot, and RSVPed yes.

I remember coming home that evening of April, and telling my wife "wow, if I was looking for a job, I'd definitely consider Arista".  The event was entirely bullshit-free, and I got to meet the exec team, who literally blew me away.  If you know me, you know I'm not impressed easily, but that day I was really unsettled by what I'd seen.  I didn't want to change jobs then, so I tried to get over it.

Over the following year, I went to their 2 subsequent customer exchanges, and each time I came back with that same feeling of "darn, these guys are awesome".  I mean, I knew the product already, I knew why it was good, as well as what were its problems, limitations, areas for improvement, etc, because I used it daily.  I knew the roadmap, so it was clear to me where the company was headed (I unfortunately couldn't say so for Twitter).  Everybody – mark my word – everybody I had met so far at Arista, with no exception, was stellar: support (TAC), sales, a handful of engineers, and all their execs and virtually all VPs, marketing, bizdev, etc.

So I decided to give it a shot and interview with them, and see where that would take me.

What's the deal with Arista's people?

Arista isn't your typical Silicon Valley company.  First of all, it doesn't have any outside investors.  The company was entirely funded by its founders, something quite unusual around the Valley, doubly so for a company that sells hardware.  By the way, Arista isn't a hardware company.  There are 3 times more software engineers than hardware engineers.  Sure we do some really cool stuff on the hardware side, and our hardware engineers are really pushing the envelope, allowing us to build switches that run faster and in a smaller footprint than competitors that use the same chips.  But most of the efforts and investments, and ultimately what really makes the difference, are in the software.

Let's take a look at the three founders, maybe you'll start to get a sense of why I speak so highly of Arista's people.

Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is one of the legends of Silicon Valley.  He's one of the brains who put together hardware design, except he seems to do so one or two years ahead of everybody else.  I always loved his talks at the Arista Customer Exchange as they gave me a glimpse of how technology was going to evolve over the next few years, a glimpse into the future.  Generally he was right, although some of this predictions took more time than anticipated to materialize.
Andy is truly passionate about that stuff, and he seems to have a special interest for optical technologies (e.g. 100Gbps transceivers and such).  He's putting the German touch to our hardware engineering: efficiency.  :)

Then there is David Cheriton, professor at Stanford, who isn't on his first stint with Andy.  The two had founded Granite Systems in '95, which got acquired in just about a year by Cisco, for over $200M.  This apparently made David a bit of a celebrity at Stanford, and in '98 two students called Larry & Sergey sought his advice to start their company, a search engine for the web.  David invited them over to talk about their project, and also invited Andy.  They liked the idea so much that they each gave them a $100k check to start Google.  This 2x$100k investment alone yielded a 10000x return, so now you know why Arista didn't need to raise any money :)
David is passionate about software engineering & distributed systems, and it should be no surprise that virtually all of Arista's software is built upon a framework that came out of David's work.

Last but not least, Ken Duda, who isn't new to the Arista gang either, as he was the first employee at Granite in '95.  Ken is one of the most brillant software engineers I've ever met.  Other common points he shares with Andy and David: super low key, very pragmatic, visionary, incredibly intelligent, truly passionate about what he's doing.  So passionate in fact that when Arista was hosting a 24h-long hackathon (Hack-a-Switch), he was eager to stay with us all night long to hack on some code (to be fair I think he slept about 2 hours on a beanbag).  I will always remember this WTF moment we had around 5am with some JavaScript idiosyncrasy for the web interface we were building, that was epic (when you're tired...).
Not only Ken is one of those extraordinary software engineers, but also he's one of the best leaders I've met, and I'm glad he's our CTO as he's pushing things in the right direction.

Of course, it's not all about those three guys.  What's even more amazing about Arista, is that our VPs of engineering are like that too.  The "management layer" is fairly thin, with only a handful of VPs in engineering and handful of managers who got promoted based on meritocracy, and that "management layer", if I dare to call it this way, is one the most technically competent and apt to drive a tech company that I've ever seen.

I would also like to point out that our CEO is a woman, which is also unusual, unfortunately, for a tech company.  It's a coincidence that today is International Women's Day, but let me just say that there is a reason why Jayshree Ullal frequently ranks high in lists such as "Top X most influential executives", "Top X most powerful people in technology", etc.  Like everybody else at Arista, she has a very deep understanding of the industry, our technology, what we're building, how we're building it, and where we should be going next.

Heck, even our VP of marketing, Doug Gourlay, could be VP of engineering or CTO at other tech companies.  I remember the first time I saw him at the first Arista Customer Exchange, I couldn't help but think "here comes the marketing guy".  But his talk not only made a lot of sense, he was also explaining why our approach to configuring networks today sucks and how it could be done better, and he was spot on.  For a moment I just thought he was really good at talking about something he didn't genuinely understand, a common trait of alluring VPs of marketing, but as he kept talking and correctly answering questions, no matter how technical, it was obvious that he knew exactly what he was talking about.  Mind=blown.

Company culture

So we have a bunch of tech leaders, some of the sharpest minds in this industry, who are all passionate, low-key, and want to build the best datacenter networking gear out there.  This has a profound impact on company culture, and Doug made something click in my mind not so long ago: company culture is a lasting competitive advantage.  Company culture is what enables you to hire, design, build, drive, and ship a product in one way vs another.  It's incredibly important.

Arista's culture is open, "do the right thing", "if you see something wrong/broken, fix it because you can", a lot like Google.  No office drama – yes, Silicon Valley startups tend to have a fair bit of office drama.  Ken is particularly sensitive to all the bullshit things you typically see in management, ridiculous processes (e.g. Cisco's infamous "manage out the bottom 10% performers in your organization"), red tape, and other stupid, unproductive things.  Therefore this simply doesn't exist at Arista.

One of the striking peculiarities of the engineering culture at Arista that I haven't seen anywhere else (not saying that it doesn't exist anywhere else, just that I personally never came across this), is that teams aren't very well defined groups.  Teams form and dissolve as projects come and go.  People try to gravitate around the projects they're interested in, and those who end up working together on a particular project make up the de facto team of that project, for the duration of that project.  Then they move along and go do something else with other people.  It's incredibly flexible.

So all in all, I'm very happy I joined Arista, although I'm sure it would have been a lot of fun too with my friends over at Twitter or CloudFlare.  There are a lot of very exciting things happening right now, and a lot of cool challenges to be tackled ahead of us.

Jan 2018 update: I just left Arista.

Additional disclaimer for this post: the views expressed in this blog are my own, and Arista didn't review/approve/endorse anything I wrote here.