Nate's face

I’ve been messing with computers since my Dad brought home a Commodore 64 when I was 10 years old. From there we built several PC’s from scratch and I fondly remember us “splurging” for the larger hard disk - 40MB vs 25MB! I think we paid an extra $200, which was a lot of money in the 80’s.

But I was never going to go into computers. I went to UCSD to study Cognitive Science - neuroscience and artificial intelligence before “AI” was all the rave. This is back when Lisp was still a thing, Java was brand new, and Python was nowhere to be found. Yeah, I’m that old - oh, “experienced”, sorry.

I fell into the original dotcom boom when I graduated and landed a job at Sun Microsystems (RIP) in the late 90’s. A 1-year break turned into 2, 3, 7… but it was so much fun. Sun San Diego was an acquisition of Cray Business Systems, and worked on the Sun e10k Starfire.1 This was a massive refrigerator-sized machine and everyone - eBay, AT&T, every XYZ.com startup - decided they needed one. We had Friday keg parties between the buildings while they backed up dumptrucks of cash. Not exaggerating - ask anyone who was there.

My boss at Sun coined the term Nateware™ in reference to the staggering number of Perl scripts I turned out back then (most of them of dubious quality). I released a few open source Perl modules, notably CGI::FormBuilder and SQL::Abstract. But all good things come to an end - or in this case a staggering crash - and when the guy next to me got laid off, I decided it was time to go.2

From there I went to Sony PlayStation where I built a system called GLUE that was used to deploy online games worldwide. v1 was written in Perl (of course) but a coworker inspired me to learn Ruby on Rails, so v2 was built in that. Because of the real-time nature of online games, we needed high concurrency, which led me to get pretty deep into networking and atomicity. I wrote an An Atomic Rant and released the redis-objects Rubygem in late 2009.

At the same time, AWS was starting to gain some buzz as the new kid on the block. I was an instant believer, as back at Sun we were working on virtual systems and datacenter automation. I became an early adopter fanboy and started bringing it into PlayStation, having to overcome a ton of skepticism in the process. I was invited to join the AWS Customer Advisory Board (CAB) alongside the likes of NASA, Netflix, and Reddit, and discovered I loved working on cloud more than video games.3

I joined AWS in the early days - right before the first Re:Invent in 2012. That year 6,000 people attended, which I thought was mind blowing at the time.4 I toured across APAC countries including Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, and others, giving talks on AWS for gaming and mobile applications. I wrote the AWS whitepaper on caching and founded the Specialist Solutions Architecture practice, growing it from just me to 150+. But the travel became too much, so I moved to Amazon Fresh and founded the Amazon San Diego office. You can read the whole story here.

After many years at Amazon I moved to Intuit, where I was VP of Engineering for Mint and then TurboTax. I made tons of great friends and Intuit was a great place to be during COVID, since they really care about their employees. But eventually I decided I really wanted to do the startup thing, so now I’m the CTO at Pipe leading engineering, product, solutions engineering, and data.

Along the way I’ve enjoyed more delicious beer and wine than I can remember, and made amazing friends around the world. Most of the code and articles I’ve written are no longer relevant, but I guess that’s technology for you. If you’re looking for somebody to help you with a startup, find me at linkedin/natewiger

All the background images are photos I’ve taken from traveling around and are (c) me.

  1. While at Sun my coworker and I wrote a now useless book, Sun Fire Systems Design and Configuration Guide. ↩

  2. Shortly before the dotcom crash, Sun used the marketing slogan “We’re the dot in dotcom” because the DNS root servers were Sun machines at the time. This ended up being a bad omen. ↩

  3. Amazon is so famously “frugal” that they put CAB members up in a cheap hotel and our welcome package was a couple of bags of Kirkland mixed nuts. ↩

  4. In 2025 over 60,000 people attended re:Invent - over 10x the first year. ↩