Avery Pennarun

I didn’t plan to be a founder; I just like turning hard problems into boring infrastructure. Today I’m co-founder & CEO at Tailscale. We’re building the simplest, most trustworthy way to connect people and devices: identity first, usability first, cryptography included. My favourite phase is the early one where nobody knows what to do and everything seems impossible. The later phases are fun in their own way: making systems repeatable, resilient, and uneventful at scale. My favourite kind of system (both software and human) is a small, obsessively-refined core with more specialized layers built on top. In other words, platforms on top of platforms. I like translating fuzzy problems into working systems; building teams that ship; holding the line on simplicity and security; writing code when it helps and deleting code when it helps more. I also do the unglamorous bits. Recruiting, customer conversations, product strategy, pricing, some sales. And occasionally, marketing poetry, but don’t tell anyone. Before Tailscale, I co-founded Net Integration Technologies (acquired by IBM) and worked on Google Wallet and Google Fiber. I’ve been building networking and developer tools for a while. I still like to get my hands dirty in Go, Rust, Python, and standards-compliant (ha ha) POSIX sh. If you’re trying to make essential stuff simpler and more trustworthy, we’ll get along. Linkedin is where I do grownup business things. You can also find a less serious chicken version of me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca or my blog at apenwarr.ca.