David Mytton

About David Mytton

David Mytton in Iya Valley, Japan

David Mytton was the Co-Founder and CEO at Server Density, a London-based SaaS infrastructure monitoring startup founded in 2009.

David built the original version of Server Density, including the open source monitoring agent and custom time series database used by 700+ customers to manage mission critical IT environments. He grew the company in the UK and US through bootstrapped revenue and subsequent VC funding through to exit in 2018 to a US cyber security business, StackPath. As part of the acquisition, David joined an organisation of 300+ people to lead Product Engineering across a suite of security products generating $200m in revenue from over 1 million customers worldwide. David left StackPath in Dec 2019.

David also founded the HumanOps community in London, San Francisco, and New York with Facebook, Financial Times, Spotify, Yelp and PagerDuty aimed at discussing how to deal with the human side of system operations: on-call, incident response, stress, fatigue, post-mortems and human process design.

Having taken funding from Seedcamp in 2009 (when Server Density was called Boxed Ice), David now advises their portfolio companies with CTO-type issues ranging from finding the first engineering hire and scaling processes for product development to creating developer communities and building high availability cloud systems. Seedcamp has 250+ companies across 4 funds worth over $3bn.

David concluded an Environmental Technology MSc at Imperial College London in Sept 2020, with a particular interest in green IT and the energy consumption of computing. He graduated with a Law undergraduate degree from University of Birmingham in 2010.

Publications

I write on this blog once per week on tech, startups or environmental technology. You can subscribe by RSS or email. I have also published several academic papers. All my publications are listed here.

Investments

I am actively angel investing in early-stage startups, usually alongside Seedcamp. I have a financial interest in the following:

I also hold public stock in several UK, US and global index funds, and cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ether and Ampleforth.

Podcasts

  • 8 Feb 2018 – Seedcamp Sessions: David Mytton on SaaS funding
    Seedcamp Podcast: This Much I Know, by Carlos Espinal
    Listen on: Soundcloud, Overcast, Archive.org
  • 24 Mar 2017 – Server Density with David Mytton
    Google Cloud Platform Podcast
    Listen on: Google, YouTube, Archive.org

Speaking

Speaking appearances which have publicly available videos:

  • 19 Apr 2019 – Philosophy of HumanOps
    Devoxx France (Paris)
    Watch on: YouTube, Archive.org
  • 14 Aug 2018 – What is HumanOps?
    HumanOps (San Francisco)
    Watch on: StackPath
  • 9 Mar 2017 – Bigtable in action
    Google Next (San Francisco)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 22 Mar 2016 – Don’t forget the humans
    London DevOps Meetup
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 26 Oct 2015 – War games – flight training for ops teams
    DevOpsDays (Berlin)
    Watch on : YouTube
  • 1 Oct 2015 – Startups & open source
    Evento Linux (Lisbon)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 30 Sep 2015 – HumanOps – scaling teams and handling incidents
    HighOps (London)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 25 Jun 2015 – How to handle incidents, downtime and outages
    DevOpsDays (Amsterdam)
    Watch on: Vimeo
  • 8 Jun 2015 – Scaling Humans – Ops teams and incident management
    dotScale (Paris)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 17 Apr 2015 – Why Puppet? Why Now?
    Puppet Camp (Paris)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 13 Apr 2015 – Why Puppet? Why Now?
    Puppet Camp (London)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 31 Oct 2014 – DevOps incident handling
    London DevOps Meetup
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 2 Jul 2014 – Running MongoDB on Google Compute Engine
    Scale Responsibly (London)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 14 May 2014 – Puppet Is Most of Your Documentation
    Puppet Camp (Tokyo)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 16 Dec 2013 – NoSQL Infrastructure
    NoSQL Matters (Barcelona)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 28 Nov 2013 – Puppet at the centre of everything
    Puppet Camp (Munich)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 20 Nov 2013 – Puppet at the centre of everything
    Puppet Camp (London)
    Watch on: YouTube
  • 16 Mar 2013 – StartOps Growing an ops team from 1 founder
    DevOpsDays (London)
    Watch on: Vimeo
  • 23 May 2013 – Remote startup – building a company from everywhere in the world
    Digital Shoreditch (London)
    Watch on: YouTube

Video

Work history

Volunteering