Strategy Decisions
23+ recent decisions
Sensitive Decision
Take the KT 9.8 one-year bridge - engineering will figure it out as long as the million dollars comes with headcount
Sep 7, 2026 · strategy · high90% confidence
Korea Telecom needs 9.8 rather than the 9.6 discussed the day before, ahead of a regulatory approval process. Bjorn proposed installing 9.8 now with CIQ supporting it for a year - including CVE remediation, which CIQ does not normally do outside LTS versions - against a commitment that KT migrates to 9.10 a year out, for a million dollars. Peter shook Bjorn hand on it and then told Nathan in their 1:1. Nathan pushed back that he does not like doing CVEs on a non-LTS 9.8. Peter did not argue the technical objection: he answered that it is not just a million dollars, it comes with people, that it will not cost more than one or two headcount, and that once those hires are indoctrinated into Nathan system he can redeploy them elsewhere.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Nathan Blackham
Refuse an SDLC release-cadence contract that would bind engineering - prioritization authority stays with Product
Sep 7, 2026 · strategy · high94% confidence
In the weekly sync with Brian Dawson and Brady Dibble, Brian proposed defining an SDLC/release process and release SLOs, framing recurring commitments (cloud image drops, driver updates, benchmark work) as an implied contract engineering should honor without being re-prioritized each time. Peter refused the framing outright and repeatedly: engineering will ignore any such document, and the only thing engineering will not ignore is Product. He told them the document has no teeth for engineering, that Product may absolutely write one and shove it down engineering throat in the moment, but the moment it becomes a thing engineering must uphold independently, Product has handed its authority away. He used the NVIDIA driver ask from the CEO the night before as the live example: rather than absorbing it as recurring work, he turned it into a ticket in front of Product so they could rank it. He also drew the boundary for what Product should write - tickets that are changes, not tickets that restate steady-state, so a one-time automation ticket replaces a recurring one.
People: Brian Dawson, Brady Dibble
Refuse to green-light the HPE indemnity escalation - this is a Bjorn call, not an Engineering call
Sep 3, 2026 · strategy · medium80% confidence
HPE was blocking the Core42 Stargate deal on the grounds that Rocky is not a certified OS on the GB300s, against a contract where HPE has guaranteed 99.999 percent uptime with penalties. On 9/1 Adam Jackson proposed that CIQ absorb HPEs support penalties for the first cluster and contract the risk out to an insurer, laid out a six-step plan starting with an immediate call to HPEs Russ Fromkin, and asked Peter and Bjorn for permission to make that call. Six minutes later Peter answered with one sentence: This is a Bjorn call, not an Engineering call. Adam stood down - I will not reach out to Russ unless I am given the green light - and Bjorn took ownership, slowing the solutioning until the actual contract terms were known. Dave Dickerson pressed the same way, asking repeatedly to see the contract. The exposure being discussed turned out to be roughly an 8 million dollar guarantee against roughly a 10 million dollar future deployment stream.
People: Adam Jackson, Bjorn Hovland, Dave Dickerson
Refuse the 9.10-as-of-today letter for KT - give them 9.6 LTS now with its real support window and a required migration, and correct the numbers publicly when they turn out to be wrong
Sep 2, 2026 · strategy · high94% confidence
Arthur Tyde pulled Peter and Ramesh Srinivasan into an early-morning call on 9/2 over a roughly 1.x million dollar KT deal. The Korea AE had drafted a letter, largely AI-written, committing CIQ to deliver RLC 9.10 LTS as of today. RLC 9.10 does not exist - it is a November-December release - and KT cannot move to 10 because their ISV and telco software is certified on 9. Peter refused the letter shape and reframed the question first: why do they want early access, what do they want to do with it, what are they trying to accomplish. He then constructed the alternative himself - ship 9.6, which is the actual LTS build (9.8 is not), now, and extend support on 9.6 toward the 9.10 LTS window - and committed to verify feasibility with Nathan Blackham before anyone signed. He noted CIQ has done nothing on 9.10 builds yet, so early access to 9.10 does not exist to give. Later the same day in the group DM with Arthur, the Korea AE and Ramesh, Peter worked the actual support windows: 9.6 support is 4 years, 9.10 is not 10 years but 8, so the gap cannot be bridged - we can give them 9.6 now but they would need to migrate to 9.10 within 4 years. He posted the correction against himself unprompted: And I was wrong - 9.10 is 8 years, not 10. But still the same overall problem.
People: Arthur Tyde, Ramesh Srinivasan, Nathan Blackham
Put the Core42 deployment on Ryan org to resource - Nathan stays advisor and the unfilled Forward Deployed Engineer goes on the contract list
Aug 31, 2026 · strategy · medium84% confidence
While assembling the supported-contacts list for the Core42 contract, Nathan Blackham asked Peter whether he knew who from Ryan Smith team he wanted on it or whether Nathan should reach out to Ryan himself. Peter answered by pointing at the unfilled role first: He is hiring a new guy specifically to do work like this. So we definitely put down an entry for the Forward Deployed Engineer TBH. And then anyone else you want from Ryan world is fine - you have the pick of the litter. Nathan then reminded him of an earlier commitment - And remember when you told me that the deployment management was not going to be on my list.... - and asked whether Ryan himself should get access or only engineers. Peter drew the boundary explicitly: Definitely add Ryan. He will be tasked with the bulk of this work is the plan. You will be there as advisor. But I do not want you getting sucked into managing this. So do not pack the list with your folks either. LEt ryan spend resources as much as possible.
People: Nathan Blackham, Ryan Smith
Hold the Core42 commitment at five weeks, signal two-to-three as likely, and trade the compression for topology data
Aug 31, 2026 · strategy · high96% confidence
Core42 sent an overnight message via Anand asking CIQ to pull in the deployment timeline because HPE is running double shifts and the delay is causing them problems. Bjorn Hovland called an impromptu Zoom with Nathan Blackham and Peter, said he wanted to pull the previously quoted five weeks into two to three, and asked Nathan to confirm his notes that two to three weeks was reasonable for a bare greenfield deployment with none of the Scott Shinn extras. Nathan agreed it was reasonable if Ansible scripts and prep work started now. Peter then set the terms of what could actually be said to the customer, in three parts. One - the estimate is fine but the commitment is not: I think two or three weeks is reasonable and possible. I would be really careful about committing to it when it is the first time we have done this with these resources. One thing goes wrong and that timeline is blown. Two - keep the contracted number and frame the gap honestly: I am really comfortable with you telling them five weeks was our padded... so it covers something goes wrong. But we think it is likely to land in the two to three week range. I am fine with that. I just would not commit to two or three weeks. Three - convert the customer urgency into an input: I would leverage it a little bit with them and say, yeah, we can probably bring it into two or three weeks. By the way, guys, the more you can give us about your topology, the more information then that you can feed us now, the way more likely we are to hit two or three weeks. Later that morning in DM he restated it: I would be VERY careful about how we word commitment around something tightly timed like this. I do not think we CAN hit this timeline, and when Bjorn said Nathan had originally said two weeks, Peter corrected the provenance of the number - No he did not. He answered a question about how fast it MIGHT go if everything went perfectly. he gave a range. the minimum side of that range was 3 weeks... There is a reason under promise and over deliver is a phrase.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Nathan Blackham
Attack the live-patching gap through Google co-development as a paid deliverable while keeping the req open - buy the timeline, do not just wait for the hire
Aug 28, 2026 · strategy · medium79% confidence
In the 2026-08-25 Exec Product Prioritization session Peter named kernel live patching as his single biggest capability gap, and said he does not need more heads beyond the requisitions already open to deliver the top of the board - with live patching the exception. Rather than waiting on that hire, he took a 5:15pm sync with Tissa Senevirathne at Google the same day, scoped specifically to whether Google can accelerate the live-patching timeline and whether it can be added as another paid deliverable to the existing engagement. He described the approach to Chris Baek and Bjorn Hovland as throwing co-development options at the wall to see what sticks. The Rex requisition stays open, so this is an additional path rather than a substitute for the hire.
People: Tissa Senevirathne, Bjorn Hovland, Chris Baek, Kelly Hall
Sensitive Decision
Broken-in-production is an automatic fast path - small thing with embarrassing impact jumps the queue regardless of the size of the epic around it
Aug 28, 2026 · strategy · medium84% confidence
In the 2026-08-25 Exec Product Prioritization session the errata CPE-to-product mapping item had drifted to number 30 on the board. The specific defect was that CIQ was shipping images identified as Rocky Linux when they should have been identified as RLC Pro. Peter moved it into the top ten on the spot. Brian Dawson stopped and asked what criterion drove the move, and Peter generalised it: something broken that we are shipping is an automatic fast path. He bounded it in the same breath - the broader errata epic is genuinely large and stays where it is; only the shipping-the-wrong-identifiers piece jumps, because fixing that piece is not dramatic at all. In the same meeting he pushed the reciprocal direction, arguing that some net-new items should be prioritized above keep-the-lights-on work because a two-month effort sitting at number 34 becomes a six-month effort.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Brian Dawson, Brady Dibble, Greg Kurtzer, Jonathon Anderson
Accept Bjorn conclusion on the Stratum name while refusing his reason - dont make a decision now that you dont have to make
Aug 24, 2026 · strategy · low58% confidence
Naming the new CIQ Kubernetes product. On Aug 23 in the executive group DM, Bjorn Hovland put up five candidates - CIQ Lattice, CIQ Stratum, CIQ Formation, CIQ Maestro, CIQ Marshal. Peter opened against the field with his own pick: my vote is Lattice, Marshal does not fit. Bjorn raised an SEO conflict, that an HR platform already owns Lattice, and Peter switched in one message - Stratum for the win, shrug. Chris Wolford independently backed Stratum and noted Lattice is also Quantum object storage system. Chris Baek started the trademark search. In the Aug 24 Kubernetes sync Bjorn laid out his actual reasoning - that over time he expects to combine the back ends into one and simply route a workload to Kubernetes or Fuzzball, but that is not the world today, so calling it the Fuzzball Kubernetes engine would muddy the waters too early and he needs to run keywords against Kubernetes as a discrete product. Peter agreed with the destination and rejected the route: he gets to the same place for totally different reasons, does not believe Bjorn story about the way the world ends up, and points out that if you do not believe it then you want the thing to have its own referenceable name anyway. Peter also asked that the final form match the naming convention used elsewhere.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Chris Wolford, Chris Baek, Greg Kurtzer, Brian Dawson
Call the Core42 SOW1 won mid-call and forbid reopening anything that does not need reopening
Aug 24, 2026 · strategy · medium88% confidence
During the Aug 24 Core42 and CIQ call, the customer side kept probing why the SOW does not cover the broader logical control set, and the CIQ team started engaging on where work splits under partials. Peter intervened twice in four minutes in the internal channel running alongside the call. First he reframed the confusion: I think we have lost track of the fact that ultimately there will be 2 SOWs. Then, once Alex Trafton had asked whether they could sign, he closed it: this is won, we should be careful not to re-open ANYTHING that does not need to be reopened. When Adam Jackson asked whether he could stop screen-sharing the HLD, Peter answered yes please stop sharing. The team changed behaviour inside the same minute - Bjorn said I will wrap, Brian Dawson said he would refrain from additional comment and let Bjorn and Adam land it, and Adam stopped sharing. The SOW1 final package went out to Core42 by email that afternoon.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Brian Dawson, Adam Jackson, Michael Shinn, Alex Trafton
Show Core42 the responsibility matrix filled in, not blanked - a first cut we are flexible on beats arriving with an empty working sheet
Aug 19, 2026 · strategy · medium90% confidence
In the Core42 implementation-review pre-call on 2026-08-18, Michael Shinn was uneasy about showing his RACI/responsibility diagram because it assumed a much larger scope than Core42 might want, and offered to blank the boxes so the conversation could fill them in. Adam Jackson agreed and asked for the letters removed so CIQ would go in with no expectation. Peter challenged that directly and argued for leaving the chart filled in, framed as a first cut with an explicit statement that CIQ is flexible and not married to any of it. Adam conceded. On the following morning call the control matrix was in fact presented as a draft rather than as a blank working sheet.
People: Michael Shinn, Adam Jackson, Bjorn Hovland, Brian Dawson, Arian Cabrera
Value delivering things over doing work - ship three items all the way out the door and nothing elsewhere, rather than move nineteen forward
Aug 19, 2026 · strategy · high81% confidence
Closing the Aug 18 Engineering Weekly Sync, Peter gave the whole engineering leadership group a standing priority instruction: I really want everybody here to value delivering things over doing work. He put it concretely - I would much rather see you do fewer things all the way to completion and get stuff shipped to customers than be reporting status of, look, I am moving the ball forward on 19 different items. And not across the finish line on any of them, but forward on 19 items. I would way rather see us ship three items and do nothing anywhere else. He grounded it in the prior half: we delivered just enough in a bunch of areas to squeak across the finish line. And we built up a bunch of tech debt. He then closed the obvious loophole - I do not want to do less just to do less - and converted the instruction into standing permission to re-allocate: if pulling people off one project and putting them on another is going to allow us to get that second one out the door, let us have a conversation and advocate for that, make that change. The engineering order of operations is the named venue for making that argument.
People: Nathan Blackham, Chris Wolford, Steve Wallace, Duane Carson, Jamie Brooks, Brady Dibble
Ask Greg to take Peter off the RESF directive so it reads as CEO-to-RESF instead of CEO-correcting-his-CTO - and pair it with a standing Lee status cadence
Aug 18, 2026 · strategy · high73% confidence
In the 2026-08-18 C-Suite Sync, Greg proposed DMing Peter, Dieter, Lee and possibly Brian to reiterate that more CIQ people need to be involved and that things need to move faster on the RESF side. Peter agreed to the substance but asked to be removed from the recipient list: So yes, but play this game with me. I think if you send that DM to the list of people you said, which includes me, and now I ask myself how I can perceive that from Brian perspective. I can perceive it as Greg telling his employee, Peter, to involve more people, and you are just notifying Brian that Peter has been told. If I am not on the email, and it is just going to Brian and Lee and Dieter, do you see what I am saying? I think you can speak really differently. He asked instead for a copy sent separately - I would just send it directly to them and then send me a copy of it just so I know exactly what you said - and suggested Greg tell them he expects Peter to be receptive to anything they ask. Separately Peter asked Greg to secure a standing status cadence with Lee, explaining that Lee is the one with the broad overview but does not work for Peter in this capacity, whereas Dieter will supply status on request. Greg agreed to have Sarah set up a weekly or biweekly Peter-Lee meeting, and Peter accepted.
People: Greg Kurtzer, Lee Hennig, Dieter, Brian Clemens, Sarah Almaraz
Refuse to debate the cause of the Rocky download reversal until the metric itself is validated - either it is the number we track and it warrants attention, or we track a different one
Aug 18, 2026 · strategy · high80% confidence
Ryan Smith sent Peter a note that Rocky usage via Fedora DNF count-me stats had reversed for the first time since RESF started, correlating with Alma rise, and that Brian Clemens attributed it mainly to Neil and Lewis leaving with Lewis publicly promoting Alma since. Peter posted the whole note to #distinguished-leaders on 2026-08-18 flagged for the next morning meeting, and rejected the attribution: I do not buy that caused 250k less downloads of Rocky Linux. Something smells funny there. When Greg asked for his gut feeling, Peter declined to give one on causation and reframed the agenda instead: What I want to talk about is whether we believe the number is the number we should be looking at. If we do, then I think it warrants attention. If it does not, then I want us tracking a different numbers. In the C-Suite Sync the same morning he repeated the magnitude objection to Greg and named where the analytics capability should sit - that is what Dieter should plug it into.
People: Ryan Smith, Greg Kurtzer, Bjorn Hovland, Brian Clemens, Lee Hennig, Dieter
Sensitive Decision
Make the LG meeting 100 percent about understanding their problem - no selling, no refusing - and pull Justin in for that purpose only
Aug 11, 2026 · strategy · high89% confidence
After a Jul 30 pre-brief in which the sales team delivered what Peter called a giant mea culpa - we are sorry we have been pitching solutions that do not work, but we still want to do something for LG, and we have realised we do not understand LGs problem - Peter set the shape of the next meeting explicitly in his Justin 1:1. I want to make that meeting 100 percent about understanding their problem. Not telling them, no, we will not do this. Not telling them, no, we cannot. Just lets understand their problem. And then you and I will come back and we will write down what we think is a good thing for CIQ to do in response to that. One option might be walk away. One option might be, I do not know what. He was equally explicit about what the invitation was not: the signup is not, hey, Justin, look what you get to build. Step one is we are going to go chat, learn. He also drew the line he will hold once a response exists: I am going to stand on, if we provide it, we are giving some surety that it is supportable and that it will work. And even if we shake your hands on you are not going to come back and complain at us, we know you are going to. So I want to make sure we are staffed for that. He distinguished that from not blocking them - well, we are not going to stop you, and that is different from we are going to provide it. He admitted openly that he cannot currently explain what LG actually wants: they seem to want a repo that does not point at anything, and I do not understand why they would want it or what problem they think it is solving.
People: Justin Haynes, Bjorn Hovland, Arthur Tyde
Endorse a radical open-source-forward external position with no gate, and pre-commit CIQ to the spark-arena seat
Jul 29, 2026 · strategy · medium68% confidence
Max Spevack reported two more accepted patches to the spark-arena benchmarking codebase and noted it creates the opportunity for CIQ to have a place at that table if and when we want it. Peter closed the option immediately - we will want it - rather than leaving it as something to evaluate later. Max then said that if asked to opine on topics at the LA meeting in a few weeks, he would deliver a pretty radical open-source forward viewpoint and how CIQ could position itself to be the champion of that idea. Peter endorsed it without conditions: sounds good overall, engineering having and showing an opinion about our future sounds fantastic to me. No pre-approval, no review of the material, no request to see it first.
People: Max Spevack
Kill the reuse justification - the LG solution does not get to be reused for other customers
Jul 29, 2026 · strategy · high87% confidence
In the multi-party LG group DM with Bjorn, Arthur Tyde, Ally Cho, Tommy Ho Sung Yi and Justin Haynes, Peter closed off the argument that building the LG package-layering solution would pay for itself across the customer base. His construction: either every customer would need different testing, or CIQ would be handing customers packages it had done zero testing on. He named the second branch as not good business, and restated the conclusion in plain form - that is another way of saying the solution for LG does not get to get reused for other customers.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Justin Haynes, Arthur Tyde, Ally Cho, Tommy Ho Sung Yi
Three non-negotiables on the LG U+ RHEL-layering path - drawn before the technical debate, with a lawyer-and-everybody-else escape hatch
Jul 29, 2026 · strategy · high86% confidence
After Howard produced a document mapping what is technically possible for layering CIQ/Rocky packages onto a RHEL host, Peter opened his reply to Bjorn with three flat lines: (1) we are not going to take CIQ packages and present them as RH packages, (2) we are not going to have CIQ repos that point to or include RH key files, (3) we are not going to host any RH files ourselves. He named the Oracle precedent Howard cited - listing RH as its own EFI vendor directory - as something CIQ can do technically but not legally or morally. He then supplied the only conditions under which he would revisit: a room where everyone confirms they understood the question, a lawyer who agrees, and evidence that CIQ would not be the only party doing it. Even then he held that it remains another release chain that is real work.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Howard, Justin Haynes
Ascender-orchestrates-Warewulf belongs in Ascender Pro as paid-tier differentiation; route Josephs proposal to Zarina
Jul 28, 2026 · strategy · medium72% confidence
Joseph Tate proposed tightening Ascender and Warewulf together - Ascender able to tell Warewulf to do things, and Warewulf passing data back at boot so a system auto-registers into Ascender Pro inventory and kicks off its own deploy, closing the gap between a system launching and being configured. Peter ruled it in immediately and specifically into Ascender Pro as paid differentiation, leaving open for debate whether any of it belongs in free Ascender. He directed Joseph to write a half-pager or one-pager and send it to Zarina, declining Josephs offer to build it himself and declining to take it into his own queue.
People: Joseph Tate, Zarina, Justin Haynes, Bjorn Hovland
Endura / Eric Sheridan: yes as a pass-through go-to-market offering only, no engineering pipeline work this half
Jul 24, 2026 · strategy · medium82% confidence
In the 7/23 C-Suite Sync Bjorn asked two questions about bringing Eric Sheridan on and attaching his Endura offering to CIQ customers. Peter answered with a conditional yes plus a hard boundary. On mechanics: fine as long as CIQ does no work - a pass-through offering linked in go-to-market land, with nothing entering the engineering pipeline this half. On the product question of whether it is a cohesive story bolted onto Rocky Pro Hardened, Peter said it is worth testing in the market, then immediately qualified his own confidence with no freaking clue, to be honest. Bjorn actual interest is the person rather than the offering - he is sharp, he knows code, he knows product, I would like to get him - and Peter left the hire itself to Bjorn.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Eric Sheridan