Ev Kontsevoy

Growing Up in Siberia

He grew up far from any technology hub. On the Conf42 podcast he said he came from a much smaller town in the middle of Siberia, in Russia. Computing had little status there, he told Authority Magazine: I grew up in the former Soviet Union, where there was a widely-held perception that a person became a computer scientist only after they failed at being a real scientist.

He started with electronics, building homemade audio amplifiers and simple radios, then moved to programming. One early project made old floppy drives play music by moving their magnetic heads, which meant learning assembly language. All of my initial programs were basically pranks. At about 12 he saw the first Terminator film, began learning object-oriented programming and read about the Morris Worm, one of the first computer worms to spread across the internet. These events felt incredibly connected to me and they made a huge impact on my thinking.

At university a classmate told him something that stayed with him: every bug in your code is a security vulnerability. He asked whether that included a division by zero, and was told that it did.

From National Instruments to New York City

His first job was at National Instruments, the maker of test and measurement equipment, where he built a user interface component that charts electrical signals in real time for instruments that run around the clock on factory floors, he told Conf42. He remembers it for one memory leak that took a very long time to track down.

I moved to New York City around 2009, right when the economy was self-collapsing, he said on the Open Source Underdogs podcast. That year he founded Mailgun, an API that lets developers send and receive email from their own software, and it joined Y Combinator in 2011. Running an email service exposed him to spam, phishing and viruses: Because email is a really dark world, so many shady things happen via email. He sold Mailgun to Rackspace in 2012, drawn by what he called its very compelling vision, for using open source and open standards to free the world from AWS dominance.

Listening to Customers at Rackspace

Inside Rackspace, then one of the largest cloud providers, he spent his time on its customers' problems. His advice to young founders comes from those years: Go look at support tickets. Go join your sales team. Like, go talk to these customers. Many of those customers were software companies asking how to run their applications on more than one cloud, and that request led him to start Gravitational in 2015, according to SaaS Club.

Gravitational's main product, Gravity, packaged software so it could be deployed into many environments. Teleport began as one part of it, a free tool for secure server access that the company open sourced in 2015 and used to attract buyers for Gravity. Gravity did well: we went like something from 0 to 4 million ARR in maybe 2, 2 1/2 ish years, he recalled.

Becoming Teleport

The pandemic changed the business. With engineers suddenly working from home, many companies lacked a safe way for them to reach servers outside the office network, and people found Teleport on GitHub. Prospects began asking to skip Gravity: Can I just buy Teleport instead? The first enterprise deal was priced on the spot during a phone call, at $25,000 a year. By late 2020 Teleport was earning as much as Gravity and growing faster, so the company stopped most of its other work and in November 2020 renamed itself Teleport. People sometimes would congratulate me on a successful pivot and I would always tell them like, look, we didn't pivot, we just focused.

Growth then hinged on who was buying. When he asked customers to explain the product back to him, one called it DVR for the cloud because it used Teleport only to record Kubernetes sessions. He concluded that individual engineers were using a small part of it and moved sales toward vice presidents of platform engineering, which nearly tripled the average deal in a year, SaaS Club reported. In May 2022 Teleport raised a $110 million Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners at a $1.1 billion valuation, bringing its total to $169 million, according to the company's announcement. By February 2025 more than 500 companies used it and revenue was growing about 50% a year, it said.

He argues that treating people, servers and AI agents as separate kinds of identity is what makes infrastructure unsafe. Fragmentation of identity is the root of all evil. Because Teleport already handled every identity in one layer, he describes the rush to give AI agents access to systems as COVID 2.0 for the business.

Off the Clock

He recommends Peter Thiel's Zero to One to anyone starting a company, and was finishing Arthur Herman's Freedom's Forge, a history of how American industry retooled to build arms for the Second World War, when he spoke to SaaS Club. It's a history book. Asked what he had improved at since his first year as a founder, he said: I became a much better listener.