From a Napkin Offer to a Global Engineering Team: My 8-Year Journey Building Kong

How a café chat and a Napkin offer in San Francisco turned into an eight-year adventure building world-class infrastructure.

The Beginning

I never thought I would stay at one company for eight years.

What I remember most clearly is a café in San Francisco. Marco Palladino had just closed a round and wanted to talk about where Kong could go next. The pitch was simple and ambitious: let’s build the best API platform in the world.

A little later, Augusto Marietti invited me to his home for dinner. He made zucchini pasta himself and told stories from the early days of the company, including how he once crashed on Travis Kalanick’s couch and lived on rice and beans just to keep costs down.

At some point that night, he wrote my offer on a napkin.

That was it. I was in.

The Early Years: Building the Core

The first four years were about building the core of the company.

Kong was already a strong open-source project, but a company is a different thing. We had to turn early momentum into a real product, a real platform, and eventually a real business. I built and led the core engineering team and worked across the Gateway 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 releases. A lot of the work was not glamorous. It was about making the system more durable, more extensible, and more usable for large enterprises that wanted something much more demanding than a cool open-source gateway.

That period also pushed us into some of the big architecture shifts of the time: cloud-native infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, hybrid deployment. We launched our first cloud offering. We started our first AI initiative. Over time, Kong grew into one of the companies that helped define the API management category.

The Global Chapter

The next chapter took me back to Shanghai, with a lot of support from Saju Pillai.

I still remember landing there during the quarantine era and spending more than a month eating meals that tasted like damp cardboard. The first thing I did after getting out was meet Datong Sun and Wangchong Zhou at a small Shanghainese restaurant. I mostly just remember how good the food tasted.

After that, things moved quickly. We looked for office space, figured out the org design, built the hiring plan, and started rebuilding Kong’s engineering presence in China from scratch.

At the beginning, it was just a handful of desks.

There was no real playbook for what we were trying to do. No mature overseas template to copy. Not that much support. Just a lot of conviction, and a lot of work.

Four years later, that small start had turned into a 60+ person engineering center. We outgrew the office three times. The team took on some of Kong’s hardest core engineering problems and supported a business that had grown past $100M ARR.

What I am proudest of, though, is not the number.

It is the team.

That group had real range. They could move fast when they needed to, go deep when the problem demanded it, and keep standards high through a lot of change. Building that team was one of the most meaningful things I have done in my career.

Gratitude

A company only looks smooth in hindsight.

Living through it never feels that way.

There were hard quarters, unclear moments, missed expectations, big swings that worked, and others that did not. Through all of it, I was lucky to work with people who kept showing up and doing the work.

To everyone I built with over those eight years: thank you.

And to the early Kongers, and the many people who joined later and carried the company forward, thank you for building something that lasted.

What Comes Next

Eight years is long enough to watch a startup become a real company.

It is also long enough to feel when it is time to do something new.

I do not have a neat lesson to end on, except this: some of the biggest things in life start in a way that looks almost accidental at the time. A café conversation. A dinner. A napkin with an offer written on it.

Then, before you realize it, years have passed, a company has grown up, and so have you.

Here’s to the next chapter. 🚀