Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman today announced that he will step down from Joyent to pursue other ventures after co-founding Joyent 10 years ago. In a blog post announcing his decision to leave Joyent, Hoffman noted that it was precisely Joyent’s spirit of innovation that inspired him to seek new ventures and opportunities as follows:
In short, that “think differently” spirit of innovation is built into our DNA and we’ve accomplished many amazing things living by it. It’s also something I value, and for that reason, I’ve made the decision to embody it in a new way by moving on to pursue new ideas and projects. I’ve loved the process of building Joyent into what it is today, as any respectable founder wishes, you look for people better than yourself who can go execute and you let them do that. The company is in great shape, with a brilliant management team and a change-the-world technology vision in very capable hands with Bryan Cantrill.
Hoffman will remain connected to Joyent as an advisor and noted that his departure was especially bittersweet given the successful reception of the Joyent Manta Storage Service, which was launched in June. Manta is a distributed object storage service marked by the integration of storage and compute. According to The Register, Hoffman noted that, in Manta, “you literally run the instance directly on top of the object directly in the storage, so it really would be like the equivalent of running your [Amazon] EC2 instance inside of [Amazon] S3.” The integration of compute and storage “stands to disrupt the storage and big data analytics markets,” according to Hoffman, even though the platform is just starting to build a customer base.
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