I'm a technologist turned product manager and into product leadership. Most of my career has been leading product teams in complex B2B applied ML/AI and "big data" products. I was product lead for Elasticsearch @ Elastic, Kong @ Kong, Vectara's head of product, and currently CPO @ SPREAD AI. We've recently relocated our family to Australia due to my wife changing positions, and realistically can't be at a company where everyone in the company is in/near Germany except me (the hours just don't work for a company that isn't committed to remote work).
I agree in principal, but this whole post is lazy if it's AI-produced. There's certainly no original thought and as the comments mention here, most of the math is outright incorrect
SPREAD builds B2B software for mechatronics customers like cars and defense systems. We help them design, build and diagnose problems with their systems faster. We do it with a combination of a well-designed ontology we've spent years working on as well as AI-based systems. Right now, we're looking for a technical writer and also someone to start our support organization.
Candidates must be in Germany already, though specific location within the country doesn't matter that much
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
SPREAD builds B2B software for mechatronics customers like cars and defense systems. We help them design, build and diagnose problems with their systems faster. We do it with a combination of a well-designed ontology we've spent years working on as well as AI-based systems. Right now, we're looking for a technical writer to join our team that's really forward thinking to own the writing, tooling, and also lead the company in ambitious technical writing.
You can reach me at shane at spread . ai with your resume
Man this hits home. I'm a reasonably sized human, but there are almost no devices on the market outside of iPhones where I can reach from bottom right to upper left with 1 hand without shifting the phone around in my hand. I hate it.
I'd be willing to take less battery life to get something like this, but nearly everything that's anywhere close either has no NFC (which means mobile payments are out the door) or doesn't have 5G or just has such an awful camera/processor as to be basically unusable for many every-day tasks.
SPREAD is a software company built to help electromechanical companies (automotive, aerospace, defense) build their products better and faster by bringing together the different data they have into a single system.
We have several of the largest automotive OEMs as customers already and are looking to expand our low-code platform.
Even worse: I got a sales call from Backblaze a few weeks ago that was an AI voice agent. It seemed super suspicious the way it was talking, so I asked it directly if it was an AI, and it then said yes.
I asked it to talk to a real person: a manager, legal, or compliance employee and it hung up on me
That is an illicit robocall, and you can pursue Backblaze under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. I would recommend filing a small claims court case, there is no gray zone for Backblaze to be making AI robocalls in.
For transparency to others here, here's what happened:
I submitted a support request and separately a GDPR request for my information and removal. I let the legal team at Backblaze know what happened as well by e-mailing legal@.
- The support request auto-responded with "We will respond to your support request (<insert ticket number here>) within one day." That was 21 days ago. No response.
- The legal team stated that my information has never been sold to 3rd parties. Strange unless Backblaze is operating its own AI cold calling en masse and then refused to complete my GDPR request of telling me the data it had collected on me. They refused to acknowledge that I had gotten an AI cold call
So no. This is frankly a BS path forward. Nobody at Backblaze as far as I can tell is taking this seriously
Remote: Indifferent. I've worked partially remote from 2015-2025 and in-person before/after. I like both
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: python, SQL and most major BI tools, javascript, elasticsearch, LLMs and surrounding tooling, various API gateways
CV: https://connelly.casa/?url=/Users/Public/Desktop/Shane%20Con...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneconnelly/
Email: in the CV
I'm a technologist turned product manager and into product leadership. Most of my career has been leading product teams in complex B2B applied ML/AI and "big data" products. I was product lead for Elasticsearch @ Elastic, Kong @ Kong, Vectara's head of product, and currently CPO @ SPREAD AI. We've recently relocated our family to Australia due to my wife changing positions, and realistically can't be at a company where everyone in the company is in/near Germany except me (the hours just don't work for a company that isn't committed to remote work).