About David Mytton
David Mytton is Co-founder of Console, which launched early-2021 to provide the best tools for developers. David is also a researcher in sustainable computing at Uptime Institute and affiliated with Imperial College London, where he completed an Environmental Technology MSc in 2020.
From 2009-2018, David was Co-founder at Server Density, a London-based SaaS infrastructure monitoring startup.
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 edge computing business, StackPath. As part of the acquisition, David joined StackPath to lead Product Engineering across a suite of edge computing and security products, leaving 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 is an Expert in Residence (unpaid) advising 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 360+ companies across 5 funds worth over $4bn.
Publications
I write on this blog about on tech, startups or environmental technology. You can subscribe by RSS or email. I have also published several academic papers:
- Data centre water consumption. npj Clean Water (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41545-021-00101-w
- Assessing the suitability of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for calculation of emissions from public cloud computing workloads. Journal of Cloud Computing (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13677-020-00185-8
- Hiding greenhouse gas emissions in the cloud. Nature Climate Change (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0837-6
Investments
I am actively angel investing in early-stage startups, usually alongside Seedcamp. I have a financial interest in the following:
- Contingent (2020)
- Graphy (2019)
- Growth State (2020)
- Living Carbon (2020)
- Loc.tax (2020)
- Monzo (2016)
- Primer (2020)
- SalesSeek (2012)
- Sinai (2020)
- StackPath (2018)
- Sylvera (2020)
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
TV
- 16 Nov 2020 – Is your online habit killing the planet?
Channel 4, Dispatches
Watch on: Channel 4
Quotes / interviews
- 18 May 2021 – Big Tech races to clean up act as cloud energy use grows
Financial Times - 16 Dec 2020 – Les géants de la tech sont-ils aussi «écolos» qu’ils le prétendent?
Libération - 13 Jul 2020 – Cloud computing could be producing hidden greenhouse gas emissions
Imperial College London News
Speaking
Speaking appearances which have publicly available videos:
- 3 Jun 2021 – Panel: Zero water data centers by 2030: mission impossible?
Scaleway Round Table (Online)
Watch on: YouTube - 26 May 2021 – Panel: What is the data center industry doing about water conservation
DCD Building at Scale (Online)
Watch on: DCD - 25 Feb 2021 – How do data center operators responsibly navigate through RECs & PPAs?
DCD Towards Net Zero (Online)
Watch on: DCD - 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, Archive.org - 9 Mar 2017 – Bigtable in action
Google Next (San Francisco)
Watch on: YouTube, Archive.org - 22 Mar 2016 – Don’t forget the humans
London DevOps Meetup
Watch on: YouTube, Archive.org - 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
- Feb 9 2018 – The Hidden Costs of Cloud
Google Cloud Platform
Watch on: YouTube, Archive.org - Sep 2017 – Server Density behind the scenes
Server Density / American Express
Watch on: YouTube, American Express, Archive.org - 17 Nov 2015 – The Server Density Story
Server Density
Watch on: YouTube, Archive.org - 28 May 2013 – Cloud Trailblazers – David Mytton, CEO of Server Density
GigaOm
Watch on: YouTube, Archive.org
Roles
Current
- Co-founder, Console
November 2020 – Present
The best tools for developers. - Research Affiliate, Uptime Institute
December 2020 – Present
Researching sustainable computing. - Expert in Residence, Seedcamp
March 2018 – Present
Advising Seedcamp portfolio companies on CTO-type issues. Seedcamp funded Server Density in 2009. Unpaid position.
Past
- VP, Product Engineering, StackPath
May 2018 – December 2019
Edge computing for +1 million customers with $200m revenue. Joined as part of the Server Density acquisition. - CEO & Co-founder, Server Density
April 2009 – May 2018
SaaS infrastructure monitoring. Acquired by Stackpath, May 2018. - Board Member, SalesSeek
July 2012 – June 2018
CRM and marketing SaaS. - Senior Technical Strategist, eConversions
December 2006 – September 2009
1 part affiliate / search marketing; 1 part high profile consumer websites. - CEO, Olate
April 2004 – December 2007
Software development, contracting and web hosting. My first company.
Volunteering
- Governor, Chelsea Community Hospital School
Feb 2018 – Oct 2020
Safeguarding Governor from Oct 2018; Vice-Chair from Oct 2019; Interim-Chair from May 2020 – Oct 2020. - Ethics Committee Lay Member, University of Birmingham
Jan 2018 – Sep 2020 - Mentor, Virgin Startup
Sep 2017 – May 2018 - Mentor, Clement James Centre
Sep 2018 – Aug 2019 - Parliamentary and policy update writer, Open Rights Group
2013