The popular chaos engineering startup, Gremlin, announced that it has brought on Josh Leslie, the former CEO of Cumulus Networks, as its CEO.

“I’m an engineer by trade. I built chaos engineering tooling for Amazon and Netflix and that was what really led to the foundation of the company,” Andrus told me. “At that point, it’s ‘let’s go figure out if there’s a market here, let’s go figure out if this product is going to work, let’s go figure out if we can build a meaningful business out of this?”

“I feel like I’ve accomplished a good amount for that first step, but I [have to] look at what is it going to take for us to go from a USD 10 million company to a USD 50 or USD 100 million company — and how I can best use my time to help impact that,” Andrus explained.

“When we sold Cumulus, I had the opportunity to take a little break from full-time work and get involved with a broader set of companies,” he told me, said Leslie. “I had a chance to advise and invest in a whole set of companies, one of which was Gremlin. I got to get to know Kolton and get to understand the business and get to understand the market — and I got to do that over a pretty long period of time. That’s really just a privilege and really good fortune to have the opportunity to really understand the business over a period of time, but more importantly, understand the relationships. Having done the CEO job once, I think one thing I can take away is it’s all about the team, it’s all about the relationships, it’s all about the trust.”

“A lot of what we’ve done in the last five years is building the category — going out, teaching people what it means and how to do it and how to do it well, whether they are customers or not,” Andrus said. “We’re going to continue on in that approach because building a large category serves us well but it also serves everybody well.”