Stephen Koza

There is a particular kind of student who arrives at engineering school certain of the plan, and then, somewhere between a thermodynamics lecture and a late-night lab, quietly revises it. Stephen Koza was that student. He went to The University of Texas at Austin to study electrical engineering, and by the middle of the degree he had reached an inconvenient conclusion: he was more interested in the business around the technology than in the technology alone. He finished the engineering degree anyway. Texans are stubborn that way.

What followed was less a straight line than a series of well-judged bets. He started, dutifully, as an engineer. Then he slid sideways into sales at a startup that was later swallowed by Motorola, and discovered he was rather good at the part of the job most engineers regard with suspicion: talking to people, and getting them to say yes. "There's still an inner nerd in me that enjoys the technical aspects," he has said, which is the sort of admission that lets you keep your credibility while quietly changing careers.

The Silicon Valley chapters read like a highlight reel that someone forgot to make boastful. At Cisco Meraki, a $3 billion division of Cisco, Koza ran Global Service Provider Sales and built the business from inception to $400 million in annual revenue, with a global team of sixty. At Samsara, the industrial software company that would go on to list on the New York Stock Exchange, he stood up a new sales division from scratch. The through-line is not an industry. It is a two-word phrase: from inception. Koza is drawn, almost helplessly, to things that did not exist the day before.

The investor who liked the company a little too much

By the early 2020s he had taken the natural next step for a seasoned operator with a taste for beginnings: he became an investor. As Managing Partner at Blue Ono Capital, he backed businesses and advised early-stage founders. One of those bets was EverOps, a San Francisco firm founded in 2012 by Chris Lahey and Tim Fewkes that embeds DevOps and IT operations teams inside high-growth companies. Koza led the investment. And then he did something that venture investors are generally advised against. He liked the company so much he took the CEO job.

It is a neat inversion of the usual founder myth. He did not sketch EverOps on a napkin. He found it, funded it, and moved into the corner office in February 2022, while the co-founders shifted to Principal roles focused on client delivery and R&D. "I have tremendous respect for Chris and Tim as individuals as well as the organization they have built over the past decade," he said at the time, which is both gracious and, given that he had just bought a stake in their life's work, diplomatically wise.

The gospel according to Koza: everything is sales

Ask Koza what he actually does all day and you get a theory of leadership disguised as a shrug. Everything at the top, he argues, is a sale of one kind or another. Recruiting a brilliant engineer is a sale. Keeping a nervous customer through a rough quarter is a sale. Raising money is, obviously, a sale. It is the sort of insight that sounds cynical until you have tried to run an organization and realized it is simply true. For a man who once expected to spend his life designing circuits, it is a remarkably clear-eyed account of where value actually gets created.

His hiring philosophy is refreshingly blunt for an industry that prefers euphemism. EverOps, in Koza's telling, runs a strict "no jerks" policy. He hires for soft skills, humility, a growth mindset and the ability to collaborate, and treats raw technical brilliance as necessary but nowhere near sufficient. "I've always enjoyed building teams of motivated, hungry individuals who want to accomplish something together," he says. Note the word together. In a field that romanticizes the lone genius, Koza is quietly betting on the opposite.

Beautifully chaotic

He is not precious about the difficulty of it all. Koza has described his life - a fast-scaling company, a young family - as "beautifully chaotic," which is possibly the most honest two-word summary of startup leadership anyone has offered. He moved from Texas to the Bay Area, traded a Fortune 500 seat for the uncertainty of building things, and somewhere in there kept the inner nerd alive. "What I've always loved about technology," he says, "is how quickly it evolves." It is a fitting creed for a man whose own career has refused, at every turn, to stand still.

The plan he arrived at UT Austin with is long gone. The engineer is still in there. And EverOps, the company he liked enough to run, now scales on the strength of a very simple idea: hire hungry, humble people, sell the vision honestly, and never lose the nerd's delight in how fast the ground keeps shifting.