Chief Technical OfficerCoreOS, Inc.San Francisco, California. Brandon Philips met Alex Polvi (’07, Computer Science) in the Open Source Lab on campus during his freshman year at Oregon State, and the friendship was destined to become an important one for them both.
"That lab experience is what helped accelerate our careers early on," said Philips. He and Polvi spent 15 to 20 hours a week in the lab applying programming fundamentals to real software development and building their leadership skills. Philips interned at NASA and IBM during his undergraduate years.
After graduating, he spent several years as a developer and software engineer before he and Polvi decided to create their own company, CoreOS, Inc., in March 2013. The friends had recognized major challenges in keeping critical backend software updated and secure, and they believed that they had a solution that would remove barriers and help organizations of all sizes accelerate their software delivery process.
"Computer security rides on a razor-thin edge of working or not working, and we want to make it easy for organizations to protect their data by rolling out and using the most up-to-date software available in their clouds and data centers," said Philips. The market response to CoreOS’s solutions has been swift, and it is now being used by some of the world’s most successful companies. "We have a relatively small team and we have some of the largest companies in the world relying on us," said Philips. "We like to say that our goal is to secure the internet."
Degrees
- B.S. Computer Science, 2007