About
Table of Contents
Welcome! I’m David Mytton, CEO of Console, which helps developers find the best tools. I’m an angel investor in early-stage developer-first startups and I’m also working towards an Engineering Science PhD in sustainable computing at the University of Oxford. My research has been featured in The Times, WSJ, Financial Times, Fast Company, Computer Weekly, and Sky News.
From 2009-2018, I was Co-founder & CEO at Server Density, a SaaS infrastructure monitoring startup. I built the original product, including the open source monitoring agent and custom time series database used by 700+ customers to manage mission critical IT environments. I 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, I joined StackPath to lead Product Engineering across a suite of edge computing and security products, leaving in Dec 2019.
Whilst completing an Environmental Technology MSc at Imperial College London 2019-2020, I developed an interest in sustainable computing and continued that research on the sustainability team at Uptime Institute, a global data center advisory organization, between Dec 2020 and Nov 2021.
I 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.
I am an Expert in Residence at Seedcamp (unpaid), a London-based seed fund with 430+ portfolio companies (who also funded Server Density).
Sustainable computing research #
I am researching sustainable computing at the University of Oxford. You may want to check out:
- An overview and interesting resources about sustainable computing.
- My academic publications on cloud emissions (Nature Climate Change), data center water consumption (npj Clean Water), and data center energy estimates (Joule)
- My contributions to the open source Cloud Carbon Footprint project – I implemented the cloud carbon coefficients calculations.
Investments #
I regularly angel invest into early-stage startups where developers are the primary user. I’m interested in anything that we’d feature in the Console devtools newsletter. See Investments for more detail.
Roles #
Current #
- Co-founder & CEO, Console
November 2020 – Present
A weekly newsletter for experienced developers (>26k subscribers) to help them find the best tools. It is read by developers from all industries and sectors, including a large number of software investors. The podcast has >13k listeners and we have worked with companies like Ably, Airplane, Incident.io, Retool, Semgrep (r2c), Swimm, Teleport, and WorkOS to reach our audience. - Expert in Residence, Seedcamp
March 2018 – Present
Having taken funding from Seedcamp in 2009, David 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 450+ companies across 4 funds worth over $7bn. Unpaid position.
Past #
- Research Affiliate, Uptime Institute
December 2020 – November 2021
Member of the data center environmental sustainability research team contracted to write reports and speak at (private) member briefings. Published a report on buying renewable energy and presented at multiple industry conferences. - VP, Product Engineering, StackPath
May 2018 – December 2019
As part of the acquisition of Server Density, 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. StackPath protects +1 million customers from DDoS attacks, examines 40Tbps of network traffic in real time from custom hardware deployed into 45+ data centres worldwide and provides critical content delivery services for major Fortune 50 enterprises. David was responsible for the product launch of the StackPath edge computing platform. - CEO & Co-founder, Server Density
April 2009 – May 2018
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. - 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 #
- Founders Forum Member, OpenUK
2021 – Present - 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
Education #
- Engineering Science (DPhil), University of Oxford, 2022-Present.
- Environmental Technology (MSc), Imperial College London, 2019-2020.
- Law (LLB), University of Birmingham, 2007-2010.