← Insights

Code Story Podcast Interview

I joined Noah Labhart on the Code Story podcast for a Season 5 bonus episode. We talked about the path from writing assembly as a kid to running product and engineering at scale, and what actually makes a technology organization work.

Ken Gavranovic lives in the northern suburbs of Atlanta — namely Alpharetta — with his wife Heather and two teenage daughters. As a kid, he was fascinated by the movie War Games. What excited him was not the war aspect, but the fact that a kid could sit in front of a computer and build anything with their mind.

While living in Galveston, TX, he dove into computers as a 10 year old, reading books and learning assembly. His first computer job was working on the Pick operating system, where he built a way for people to send faxes from their desk. The year after, his solution was a two million dollar business.

After that he moved to NY to write software, and then to Florida. While in Florida the internet started booming, about the same time as AOL. He figured out everyone was going to run their business on the internet, so he moved to Atlanta to be in a place with the highest density of bandwidth, and built what is known as web.com today.

Ken was part of many transformational efforts throughout his career. Before the venture he was in at the time of this interview, he ran product and engineering at New Relic. Three things drew him to that role: a purposeful culture, a world-changing goal, and the size of the opportunity in front of him.

This interview was recorded in 2021. Role and company references reflect that time.