Stanford University

University of Michigan

Member Of Technical Staff at Tailscale

Taking a break while working to transition from Tech to Climate work.

Career Break

Career transition

Limited Partner in several venture investment funds with guiding principles:
- Climate change mitigation and adaptation
- Non-majority, underestimated founders

I also make occasional direct seed investments in companies.

decarbon earth

Investor

Member of Cohort 5 of the Climatebase Fellowship, the climate career accelerator.

Climatebase

Climatebase Fellow

Led the engineering team at Tailscale, growing from a team of 6 engineers to a team of 40+. Built the team through several step functions in growth:
- from being a single team where everyone knew what everyone else was doing to a set of independent teams with Engineering managers
- from forming ephemeral project teams to tackle specific projects to standing teams working long-term in a given area
- from a small team with no levels and no titles to development of an innovative career ladder and career planning

My role at the beginning included hands-on effort in building the product, especially in enabling specific deals and deployments while the team focussed on the mainstream. As the team has grown and we've added structure to the organization my role has shifted to be almost entirely leadership, with just a small amount of development work to stay in touch with the reality of it.

Practice Management and Leadership philosophies:
- Small teams are bigger than large teams
- Enthusiasm improves productivity
- Project plans should have top-down and bottom-up elements
- There is an ideal rate of breakage: no more, no less
- The service is the product
- Cadence trumps mechanism
- Spreading knowledge makes it thicker

Tailscale

Vice President of Engineering

Provided free advising sessions to help everyone bring their whole talent to fixing climate change. I provided mentorship, practice interviews, or general career advice with 97 enthused, motivated future climate professionals.
https://workonclimate.org/expert-office-hours/

Work on Climate

Climate Community Mentor

Founder of a startup to build instruments to measure carbon levels in soil via the energy from neutron scattering back from the ground using a scintillator. This could be done on-site and generate a reading immediately, versus sending soil samples back to a lab for time-consuming chemical analysis.

Though I think the idea was reasonable, this was not a viable business. It needed a neutron source safe enough and cheap enough to be able to FedEx to locations, and existing sources do not fit the requirements. Developing a new neutron source would be a career in itself.

Climate Founder

Provided software assistance to Project Drawdown https://www.drawdown.org/ in converting climate model implementations from a large collection of Excel files to a single implementation in Python.

Additionally, I implemented GIS processing to combine several satellite imagery datasets to generate accurate inputs for the Drawdown land use solution models: https://github.com/ProjectDrawdown/spatial-aez

This was a volunteer effort, and anything which cannot go on forever will eventually stop. I stopped the full-time volunteer work after two years.

Project Drawdown

Senior Technology Fellow

Tech Lead / Manager for a team of 28 software engineers. Delivered the devices which provide the Google Fiber Internet and Television service. Included set top boxes (3 generations), DVRs (3 generations), Wifi routers (2 generations), Optical/Ethernet interfaces (3 variants), mmWave radio link, and a few more. We built 16 different devices, all from one codebase.

Over the course of six years I grew the team from four engineers to twenty eight, through a combination of external recruiting and internal transfers from other parts of Google. The team experienced extremely low turnover during this time, and took on additional responsibilities in new business areas for Fiber.

The team provided the primary monitoring and diagnostics for managing the Fiber service, including operational support and incident response for the running of the Fiber service.

Philosophically I believe that Engineering Managers should stay in touch with the reality of the work by spending at least a portion of their time doing the work. I continued to contribute to the codebase, at least a bit, throughout my tenure on the project.

Much of the platform released as open source code: https://gfiber.googlesource.com/ and mirrored at https://github.com/DentonGentry?tab=repositories

Recognition:
+ Great Manager Award 2015. 25 out of 10,000 managers are recognized each year.
+ Google Citizenship Award 2015
+ Google Fiber Customer Champion Award 2013 (operational and escalations support)

For the Googlers & Xooglers: this was an L7 SWE role.

Google

Senior Staff Software Engineer & Manager

Software support for a massively multithreaded network processor to implement identity-aware network security policies. Implemented hash-based fastpath to quickly retire packets on fully-analyzed flows. Implemented support for multiple generations of chips in a single software image with negligible performance impact. Developed High Availability feature to keep user state synchronized between redundant systems. Developed internal control plane used to communicate between the control and datapath processors, with additional capabilities layered atop it such as publish/subscribe and a pseudo network interface. Led response teams to resolve hot issues arising during large customer deployments.

ConSentry Networks

Member of Technical Staff

Provided extensive software input into next generation Extreme switch ASICS, from feature set definition down to optimization of register access. 
Developed tools to instrument and analyze software performance, uncovering several significant bottlenecks in common operations. 
One of the primary resources for Linux/MIPS work, including debugging issues in VM and interrupt handling and filesystems implementation. 
Defined and implemented the underlying software control mechanism for a large chassis switch product, a framework to maintain distributed state.

Extreme Networks

Senior Software Engineer

Defined system architecture and began implementation of next generation of access networking using Ethernet in the First Mile. System included extensive IP and QoS features. Hardware architecture relied on FPGAs and switch fabrics for quick time to market. Software architecture used an embedded Linux kernel with remote administration of all services.

Extensive contributions to the IEEE 802.3ah standards working group in Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM).

Dominet was unable to raise funds in the aftermath of 9/11/2001, and shut down.

Dominet Systems

Distinguished Engineer

Architectural role for several network interfaces for Sun Solaris platforms, including gigabit ethernet and OC-48 Packet over Sonet. Designs included significant packet processing and TCP/IP acceleration features. Emphasis was on total system performance, achieved by tailoring the NIC design to the needs of the rest of the system. 

Implemented Solaris kernel driver for SBus and PCI OC-12 ATM interface. Implemented test programs and software workarounds of hardware bugs.

Earlier:
Software: Implemented Solaris kernel driver for SBus and PCI OC-12 ATM interface. Implemented test programs and software workarounds of hardware bugs, allowing product shipment on schedule despite roadblocks.
Hardware: Designed the receive segmentation and reassembly core and DMA engine for an OC-12 ATM interface for Sun workstations, using Verilog HDL and Synopsys toolset. Involved in all phases of the design from early brainstorming through bench debug and bringup. Extensive involvement in software interface and TCP/IP protocol acceleration issues. Previous tasks included ASIC verification on earlier ATM chips.

Denton Gentry