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CEO, founder, board director, advisor, investor, builder, and musician. GTM focus via 25+…
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisAutoptic Co-Founder & CTO Peco Karayanev and I just finished 2.5 fantastic days in New York City. There, we sponsored a CTO Social at the historic Hotel Chelsea Lobby Bar, hosted a DevOps Meetup at the very fun Cellar Dog, and met with friends, customers, prospects, and partners across Manhattan. Thanks to everyone who joined us for coffees, meals, drinks, conversations, idea exchanges, planning, reviews, and more. I'm sitting on the plane right now back to Austin even more excited and energized by how DevOps Change Resilience can positively impact large scale, complex production software systems. And I can't wait to get back to my beloved NYC again soon. Dave Panos, this trip reminded me a bit of our early days at Pluck (one of my favorite career chapters, as you know). I even met with two old Pluck friends you'd remember well. Appreciate your mentorship back then and your support of Autoptic now. (BTW, I highly recommend both the Cellar Dog (low key fun) and the Hotel Chelsea Lobby Bar (beautiful cocktail vibe) for events in New York. It was my first time at both and I plan to go back to each). #AI #devops #CTO #NYC
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisAutoptic has been named one of 12 Austin Startups to Watch for 2026 by the Austin Business Journal. Grateful to our Autoptic customers, seed investors (including 14 here in Austin), team across Austin and Latin America, and Co-Founder & CTO Peco Karayanev. Thank you ABJ assistant managing editor Brent Wistrom for the award.
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisI've been fascinated by change (transformation, growth, evolution, etc.) and natural environments (forests, rivers, mountains, etc.) since I was a young boy. I even named my advisory company after the alder tree, a pioneering species that is anti-fragile, hardening when exposed to water and capable of supporting critical infrastructure like the city of Venice. At our AI DevOps startup Autoptic, my co-founder Peco Karayanev and I think about change a lot. We offer that software CTOs and their infrastructure teams benefit from building change resilient production systems across four key areas: 1. Operational Updates (Intentional Internal Changes) 2. Human Mistakes (Unintentional Internal Changes) 3. Dependent Systems (Changes in the Technology Ecosystem) 4. External Events (Environmental Changes) The LinkedIn article below provides perspectives on each form of change along with examples. It also offers that as ecologists study ecosystems to understand how natural systems evolve, engineering teams can study change itself to better understand the potential risks to their systems. When software teams gain visibility into how changes occur, how they interact, and how they influence system behavior over time, they can move from a mode of reactive firefighting toward proactive change resilience. Appreciate your feedback and perspectives on these thoughts. #ai #devops #ctos #change #resilence
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisLast night, Autoptic Co-Founder & CTO Peco Karayanev and I hosted an amazing group of CTOs and Software Engineering leaders at Carve in central Austin. Feeling deeply grateful to everyone who joined and to the Carve team who did not disappoint (food, service, and atmosphere). Thank you. As you might imagine, we talked about AI, the future of software, DevOps, change, systems risk, observability, technology stack convergence, operational resilience, and anti-fragility. At the same time, we discussed music, travel, soccer, Austin, college basketball, 80s skateboarding, and much more. Special thanks to our guest who battled jet lag to join us after returning from Antartica (and shared great penguin stories). Peco and I love helping peers connect, learn from each other, and forge new friendships. We will be hosting DevOps socials soon in both Austin and NYC (at fun places). We will also continue to convene CTOs and engineering leaders in a variety of formats and approaches (in Austin, NYC, and elsewhere). If you are interested in joining any of our CTO or DevOps social gatherings please DM me or Peco. And thanks once more to everyone who came last night! #AI #austin #devops #cto
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisThe approach that software engineering teams take in 2026 for AI-fueled DevOps is pivotal. Autoptic CTO & Co-Founder Peco Karayanev and I offer 11 Requirements for Resilient Production Systems that leverage the potential of AI. 1. Federated Data Access (Stop the Data Shuffling Tax) AI for DevOps must operate on a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) or Federated model. It must also have real-time, read-only permissions to query your existing tools (AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, GitHub, Jira, Prometheus, etc.) via APIs called on demand. 2. Answers, Not Chats (The Brief) The primary output of a production software resilience system, especially when using AI for SREs, shouldn't be a chat stream; it should be a structured "Brief." 3. Multi-Step Orchestration (Showing Work) An AI DevOps system must support multi-step investigations. Execution should be modeled as a logical plan. A final synthesis step must then read all the clues gathered and produce a single Brief. 4. Deterministic Tooling (Preventing Hallucinations) The AI must use a defined Deterministic Toolset. Hardcoded, safe scripts, ideally via a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), should do the actual data-gathering. The LLM's job is to read and summarize the structured results those scripts return. 5. Contextual Inference (Connecting Weak Signals) While your AI DevOps system must leverage deterministic tools for execution, its analysis must be highly context-aware. The AI must continuously run Contextual Inference across your entire history of Change Events. 6. Strict Schema Adherence (Forcing the Mold) To control the model, its outputs must be schema-conforming. Every time the LLM summarizes data or proposes a step, it must return a parseable JSON payload or tool-call that perfectly matches expected fields and types. 7. Model-Agnostic Orchestration (Avoiding Lock-In) The AI DevOps platform must be model-open (e.g. LLMs). You should be able to swap underlying models, tweak prompts, and adjust tool definitions dynamically based on various factors. 8. Agent Observability (Monitoring the AI) Every agent execution and LLM evaluation must be fully observable and logged. The system should record the tools used, step durations, token counts, and the exact reasoning used to generate the final Brief. 9. Token Discipline (Efficiency & Speed) The system must enforce bounded execution and token discipline. Deterministic pipelines must do the heavy lifting (filtering, aggregating, and detecting changes) before the data ever reaches the LLM. 10. Safety Rails (Governance) The AI agent should have broad Read access to investigate, but Zero Write access to execute changes without a human signature. 11. Data Privacy Guardrails The AI should process your logs to solve the specific ticket and then flush its context window. The system should intelligently track change data in a ledger that becomes smarter over time. What do you think? Anything missing? Alternative ideas? Feedback is appreciated! #ai #devops
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisCTO, DevOps, and engineering leader friends: ever ponder how patterns, potentially buried across thousands of events, multiple systems, and extended time periods, might signal operational software problems before they become incidents? Autoptic CTO & Co-Founder Peco Karayanev today shared his thoughts on change resilience—a strategy of focusing your reliability efforts on the early detection of weak signals caused by a set of changes. Change resilience recognizes that modern distributed systems act more like biological ecosystems than linear flowcharts. Significant incidents rarely have a single root cause. Instead, they are often the result of stacking degradations that build up over time. By detecting these subtle but important behavioral shifts early, you can prevent them from compounding into the multi-factor outages that often define significant production events. The full article is on our website. We appreciate your comments, likes, and shares. https://lnkd.in/g5AjJ4HcWhy a Change Resilience Strategy is Key for Modern DevOpsWhy a Change Resilience Strategy is Key for Modern DevOps
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisThank you Brent Wistrom, Austin Inno, and Austin Business Journal, for your coverage of the Autoptic general availability (GA) and seed investors announcement, including the snippet here. Reference to the story is included below. Ongoing thanks to all 23 Autoptic seed investors, including the full crew here in Austin: Andrew Busey, Aneesh Desai, Brian Gambs, Chris Aniszczyk, Dave Panos, Dustin Kirkland, Ernest Mueller, Jim Offerdahl, Rob Taylor, Scott Buxton, Scott Harmon, Will Ballard, and William Chan. Additionally, Autoptic Co-Founder & CTO Peco Karayanev and I (both in Austin) are investors via our Safe vehicle. #austin #devops #ai
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisThank you to Michael Vizard and Alan Shimel and your team for the DevOps.com feature story on the Autoptic GA and seed financing announcement. Appreciate you covering Autoptic Co-Founder & CTO Peco Karayanev's perspectives on change resilience agents here: https://lnkd.in/gXKRykJ5Autoptic Unfurls AI Change Resilience Agents to Analyze Telemetry Data - DevOps.comAutoptic Unfurls AI Change Resilience Agents to Analyze Telemetry Data - DevOps.com
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Steve Semelsberger shared thisExciting moment: today we announced GA of the Autoptic change resilience agents product! And we unveiled our first 23 seed investors. Autoptic operates in the DevOps space. It exists to help enterprise CTOs and their software engineering teams better detect, diagnose, and repair lurking production problems before they become major incidents. For those who like details: Autoptic is an enterprise software solution that delivers AI-powered Agents that leverage troves of complex telemetry (logs, metrics, events, and traces) from 10+ DevOps integrations, directly and through OpenTelemetry (OTel). Integrations include CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Datadog, GitHub, Grafana LGTM, Jira, and OpenSearch. Autoptic Agents are built on Tools that are created with a DSL called PQL (Performance Query Language), enabling highly efficient and predictable change detection analytics. The product has been built over the last two years under the leadership of our amazing CTO & Co-Founder, Peco Karayanev. Thank you, Peco. What you and your team have created is innovative, powerful, and massive—and I do not use that last term lightly. Autoptic seed investors span former and current entrepreneurs, CEOs, CTOs, operators (e.g. CFOs), and professionals (e.g. venture capitalists). 14 are here in Austin, TX where we are headquartered. We are deeply grateful to each. They are: Allen Morgan, Andrew Busey, Aneesh Desai, Aziz Gilani, Brian Gambs, Chris Aniszczyk, Cihan HIRÇIN, Dan Van Tran, Damon Edwards, Dave Panos, Dimitri Vlachos, Dustin Kirkland, Ernest Mueller, Greg O'Reilly, Ilan Rabinovitch, Jim Offerdahl, Nacho De Marco, Rob Taylor, Scott Buxton, Scott Harmon, Terry Angelos, Will Ballard, and William Chan. Thank you all, again, for your support and confidence. Today, Autoptic has 6 customers. With today's product general availability, we are in active discussions with dozens more organizations and welcome large software engineering teams to explore the significant impact possible with Autoptic. Thank you to our existing design partners and customers. Thank you also to our advisors, team, and friends. We would not be here without you. More details on Autoptic, including today's complete announcement, are available on the company website. There, you can also learn more about three current Job opportunities (FDEs, CoS, and Sr. Eng). If you are inclined, we are grateful for your likes, comments, and shares of this post to help spread the news.
Steve Semelsberger commented on a post
20h
So happy for you and for the Aspen Institute, Keith Yamashita. Excited to see where this goes. Love that you continue to honor your inner artist as you approach your next decade.
Steve Semelsberger replied to a comment
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Barton George absolutely! Peco Karayanev is very involved and we are planning on being a (small) sponsor. See you there?
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Steve Semelsberger liked thisSteve Semelsberger liked thisThere are a lot of things that I have loved in my career. This honor is a big one. I have a witchy, intuitive sense it’s going to be path-changing. If you would have asked me at age 4, “who are you?” I would have said, “I’m an artist.” At age 12, same answer. Age 18, same. What I think you would have meant if you were asking me that question, those many years ago: Who are you? What do you care about? What do you hope for in this world? And I would have probably said some version of—I am sensitive, emotional, I feel things. I make things. I draw. I photograph. I just want a world that is safe for boys like me. Somewhere in college my answer changed. “I’m an artist” gave way to “I want to be an economist.” I realize now that was because that was employable—or it sounded employable! Which gave way to “I’m a writer,” which was for me employable. Then “founder.” “Consultant.” “Board member.” All adopted terms in a quest to be understood and seen as a person. All better terms for surviving in a world where livelihood dominates—and our worth comes from our output. Perhaps all the way through, the artist was still there. That four-year-old me still there, maybe buried deep down. Still feeling things. Still hoping. Still making things. In my work, I have tried to fight for beauty in the work I’ve done. Last year I thought I was turning 60—a major milestone and turning point. And I made a vow to myself: Let that four-year-old me back in. Revisit and reclaim my artist self. It turns out, I was not indeed turning 60, but rather, I turned 59. (Calendars screw me up!) Which makes the year I am living a bonus year. A year I was not expecting. And along comes this great honor to be a part of the inaugural class of the Michael D. Eisner Arts & Culture Fellowship—from The Aspen Institute. 22 artists of a wide variety of origins and backgrounds, all trying to do something in their part of the world. It’s like a bonus thing in my life, granted out of thin air like a gift and an invitation—and I intend to breathe it in as deeply as my lungs can bear. The Aspen Institute Aspen Ideas Aspen Global Leadership Network https://lnkd.in/ebMqCRKPAnnouncing the First Class of the Michael D. Eisner Arts and Culture Fellowship Announcing the First Class of the Michael D. Eisner Arts and Culture FellowshipAnnouncing the First Class of the Michael D. Eisner Arts and Culture Fellowship Announcing the First Class of the Michael D. Eisner Arts and Culture Fellowship
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Steve Semelsberger liked thisSteve Semelsberger liked thisWe're entering a new era of enterprise software. AI agents can now reason, act, and learn, and every company is exploring how to bring them into production. But the platform to deploy them with trust and governance doesn't exist yet. That’s why I started Sycamore. Sycamore is the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. We give organizations the platform to build, deploy, and orchestrate autonomous AI agents with enterprise-grade security, human oversight, and organizational intelligence that compounds over time. We’re focused on three things: -> A trust kernel where agents earn autonomy through demonstrated reliability -> An adaptive factory that builds software and agents tailored to each enterprise -> Collective intelligence that understands how your organization actually works Today we're announcing a $65M seed round led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed, with participation from Abstract, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Fellows Fund, E14 Fund, and an exceptional group of angel investors. Thank you to our investors and angels who backed this vision early. Your conviction means everything. We're working with Fortune 500 companies to make autonomous enterprise AI real with humans in control. We're also hiring across engineering, applied AI, security, and infrastructure. If you want to build the operating system for the next era of enterprise software, let's talk. https://sycamore.so/
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Steve Semelsberger liked thisSteve Semelsberger liked thisI don't know about you, but 2026 has me feeling like... this. Not just me, right? Well — I have a challenge that will make you feel like this > 😄 I'm back on the market and actively looking for my next remote Senior Customer Success Manager role. Here's the resume part — I'll keep it short, I promise. 📊 $3.5M+ ARR portfolio managed 💰 $800K ARR generated through pilots & POCs 📈 $100K+ ARR expansions with existing clients 🔒 95% Gross Revenue Retention ⭐ 5x G2 five-star reviews + 10/10 TrustRadius scores 🏢 6 years in CS across AI, QA, Media & Insurance 🌴 Pacific time zone If you've ever been on the other side of a job search, you know what one connection can mean. Here's the challenge: If you want to be the master connector, tag any recruiters and/or hiring managers directly in the comments below. I know recruiters and hiring managers are busy — I won't waste a single conversation. Whoever gets the most of their tags to respond publicly in this thread wins a winner announcement post with a personal update on Tuesday, March 31st. The scoreboard is live and public. Everyone can see it. 👇 Don't know a recruiter? A like, comment, or repost helps this reach the right person — and that matters just as much. 🙌 Good luck and truly, thank you. 🙏 P.S. Shoutout to Chewy Studios (specifically Sebastien Ettinger) for the 2017 professional headshot. It finally found its moment. 😄 Syed Adam Hussain Maddisen Philbrick Vanessa Alcorta Wijs Vanessa Vadas Ed Torsney Josh Zamora Olivier F. Ash Turner Joy Jack Stephen So Matt LoCoco Sadie B Matt Denoyer Alex Stephanak Syedira Mandal Renita Käsper Matt Rush
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Steve Semelsberger liked thisSteve Semelsberger liked thisWe’re celebrating 18 years of Serent Capital! We are now old enough to vote, serve, and even buy a lottery ticket. We’ve been building since 2008 and we're only getting better with age. No plans to slow down anytime soon, especially now that we have a company birthday cake. Thank you to the founders, team members, investors, and portfolio leaders who’ve been part of the journey.
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