JP La Torre and the business of getting things to work

The question kept coming up at Caylent’s town halls. Employees wanted stock options. They submitted their questions anonymously, and the leadership team answered them live, unscreened. By February 2022, the question had become a company policy: a global stock option program for existing and new employees. There were 200 of them then. An ownership conversation had found its way out of the suggestion box.

JP La Torre, Caylent’s co-founder and CEO at the time, connected the decision to a company value. “Rise Together is one of Caylent's core values,” he said. The phrase acquired some substance when the company agreed to share a stake in the business. Values are easy to print. Putting them into an employee benefit takes a meeting with rather more paperwork.

This is a useful place to meet La Torre. His public career contains the familiar ingredients of a technology founder’s biography: an accelerator, funding rounds, partnerships and a rapidly expanding team. But the town hall episode brings the enterprise down to human size. People asked for something. Management considered it. The organization changed. That small sequence sits comfortably beside the much larger changes he has spent his career trying to make possible.

A founder on both sides of the screen

Before Caylent, La Torre worked as an on-site IT engineer at Make It Work and founded a cloud hosting company serving small and midsize businesses. His education took a parallel route through the University of California San Diego, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in management science. The program sat in the Economics Department. His background combined the practical business of keeping technology useful with the study of how businesses operate.

In 2015, he co-founded Caylent with Stefan Thorpe. La Torre became CEO; Thorpe was CTO. Their early proposition was concrete: help developers build, deploy and manage applications in their own cloud environments. The company began with a platform, a piece of software intended to take some of the repetitive work out of software delivery. Even the people building applications needed help getting them out of the workshop.

Caylent joined Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in New York and graduated in 2016. By the following year, its public milestones included a beta release and a crowdfunding offering. The offering closed in September 2017 with $99,880 raised. In the scale of later cloud investments, that is a modest number. For this early version of the business, it bought room to keep working.

The platform also had to learn some manners. Feedback from early users prompted a redesign, including an onboarding wizard that guided developers through configuring and launching an application in four steps. That is a telling early detail. The job involved understanding where a user got stuck and changing the experience accordingly. A deployment tool could have plenty of technical capability and still need a better front door.

The company grows around the problem

As Caylent developed, the business broadened from developer tools into cloud services. By September 2021, it was announcing a $16 million growth equity investment from East Los Capital and a larger relationship with Amazon Web Services. La Torre said Caylent had chosen AWS as its customers’ cloud platform. The commitment gave a growing services organization a specific ecosystem in which to build its expertise.

The customer problem had an unglamorous, expensive quality: organizations wanted to use the cloud and lacked enough specialists to carry out the work. Caylent’s services extended through migration, development, data and related engineering. New infrastructure still needed people who understood how to put it together. A subscription could open the door; someone had to decide what went through it.

At the time of the investment announcement, Caylent reported 300 percent year-over-year growth and said it was adding 50 employees a quarter. Those were the company’s figures for that period, rather than a permanent growth rate. They describe a particular operating challenge: finding enough capable people while expanding the range of work they could do.

In June 2022, Caylent formally expanded into Canada, adding a third delivery region alongside the United States and Latin America. La Torre described plans to bring roughly two dozen delivery team members into the Canadian organization immediately, with more hiring intended. The geography mattered because a services company’s capacity travels with its people. Its map is also a map of who can do the work.

The company achieved AWS Premier Tier status in 2022. That November, it announced a majority growth investment from Gryphon Investors, with management and executive chairman Stephen Garden collectively retaining significant equity. The organization now had a different scale and a different set of backers from the early deployment platform. Developer tools remained part of its history; the enterprise around them had become considerably more complicated.

A good moment to give up the chair

August 2023 brought two announcements, separated by a week. On August 15, Caylent announced its No. 93 position on the Inc. 5000 and No. 7 ranking among IT service providers. On August 22, it named Lori Williams as CEO. La Torre would move into an advisory role and continue serving on the board.

The succession had a clear division of responsibilities. Williams arrived with experience running and growing technology services organizations. La Torre endorsed her understanding of the business and its culture. He was handing over the daily operating role while retaining a connection to the company he had helped create. A founder’s work can change its shape, too.

His own response was warmer than the formal announcement. “What a ride!” he wrote, thanking the Cayliens, as employees called themselves. He described having led the team from zero to more than 360 people. The number supplies scale; the thank-you supplies the object of his attention. Hundreds of careers had become part of what began as a small startup.

“What a ride!”

JP La Torre, on his 2023 CEO handover

There is a temptation to treat a founder’s departure from the CEO job as a final scene. In La Torre’s case, it became a hinge. Caylent continued with new leadership. He continued as an advisor and board member. The eight-year operating chapter closed with a handover and a public expression of gratitude, leaving room for another beginning.

Back at the beginning, with different tools

In 2026, La Torre co-founded Climb, a Dallas-based consultancy focused on the Databricks data and AI ecosystem. He is its CEO. The move puts him back in the business of helping enterprises use a technology platform, this time with data foundations and production AI at the center of the work.

On September 16, 2026, Climb announced a growth investment from RLH Equity Partners. The firm said the backing would support its Databricks relationship, development of its services and the systems it uses to deliver client work. The announcement described a company already serving enterprise customers in its first year. It also set out a familiar founder’s agenda: strengthen the team and make delivery more repeatable.

The comparison with Caylent is useful without pretending the two businesses are interchangeable. Caylent built its later services around AWS. Climb has selected Databricks. Both choices concentrate expertise around a platform customers must learn to use effectively. The platform supplies capabilities; the consultancy takes on the implementation decisions that accumulate around them.

Climb’s ambition has an economic test attached. The company wants customers to turn data and AI spending into observable business results. That makes the finish line more demanding than a demonstration that looks promising in a meeting. A working system must survive contact with the organization that uses it, including its data, permissions, habits and responsibilities.

What a company remembers

La Torre has also begun spelling out what he thinks should change inside a consulting firm. His May 2026 essay, The AI-Native Consulting Firm: Rethinking Services for the Agentic Era, argues for persistent teams, reusable operational knowledge and commercial arrangements tied to results. He is interested in the organization doing the consulting as much as the technology being installed.

His accompanying public commentary points to knowledge lost through rotating teams and disconnected practices. The proposition is that experience from one engagement should become useful machinery for the next: systems and ways of working that retain what the firm has learned. This is an argument about accumulated knowledge. Its value depends on whether teams can actually use it when another customer arrives.

There is a thread connecting that idea to the earlier Caylent story. An onboarding redesign responded to users. An ownership program responded to employees. A cloud services business developed around customers who needed expertise. Each episode involves changing the organization or its tools in response to work already happening. The connection is a reading of his career, rather than a claim that every decision followed a single master plan.

La Torre’s current bet is that a consultancy can make its learning travel further. He has experience building a team, expanding a service business and passing on the CEO role. At Climb, those experiences are inputs to a new company whose results will have to be earned. The next customer will bring a different problem. The useful question is how much of yesterday’s work will help solve it.