Charity Majors: Taking an Outsider's Approach to a Startup

In the early 2000s, Charity Majors was a homeschooled kid who’d gotten a scholarship to study classical piano performance at the University of Idaho. “I realized, over the course of that first year, that music majors tended to still be hanging around the music department in their 30s and 40s,” she said. “And nobody really had very much money, and they were all doing it for the love of the game. And I was just like, I don't want to be poor for the rest of my life.” Fortunately, she said, it was pretty easy at that time to jump into the much more lucrative tech world. “It was buzzing, they were willing to take anyone who knew what Unix was,” she said of her first tech job, running computer systems for the university. Eventually, she dropped out of college, she said, “made my way to Silicon Valley, and I’ve been here ever since.” Majors, co-founder and chief technology officer of the six-year-old [sponsor_inline_mention slug="honeycomb" ]Honeycomb.io,[/sponsor_inline_mention] an observability platform company, told her story for The New Stack’s podcast series, The Tech Founder Odyssey, which spotlights the personal journeys of some of the most interesting technical startup creators in the cloud native industry.