"Never stop learning."
Stephen Curran Tweet
Stephen Curran is a seasoned Site Reliability engineer who believes in making start-up infrastructure as easy as pressing a button. His goal is to help startups achieve success through amazing infrastructure and DevOps practices.
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Table of Contents
Let’s start with a brief introduction first. Introduce yourself to our readers.
Stephen Curran: My name is Stephen and I have spent my time building infrastructure for tech companies from start-ups to the big 5. Over my career, I’ve learned how difficult it is for startups to achieve easy and reliable tech infrastructure and so I have made it my goal to use my experience to help startups achieve reliable infrastructure by making it easy and cost-efficient.
Our audience is interested to know about how you got started in the first place. Did you always want to become a CEO or was it something you were led to? Our readers would love to know your story!
Stephen Curran: Honestly for me it just happened, Over the years I would talk to other professionals in my industry and I consistently heard horror stories about startups having a stressful time trying to scale their infrastructure to meet their ever-growing demands some of which would even fail to take off due to problems with their tech stack, so I made it my mission to help these companies the only way I could do I came up with a solution that could meet their not just their current demands but there future demands too. With each new customer, I feel a sense of pride watching them not have to worry about cloud costs and scalability in a way becoming a CEO for me was the most rewarding thing possible for that reason.
“Selfmade” is a myth. We all received help, no doubt you love to show appreciation to those who supported you when the going got tough, who has been your most important professional inspiration?
Stephen Curran: I grew up idolizing Steve jobs his approach to design and simplicity was always something I admired.
How did your journey lead you to become a CEO? What difficulties did you face along the way and what did you learn from them?
Stephen Curran: I felt compelled to do it because I wanted to help the Steve jobs of the future. There were and still are a lot of difficulties for example finding the right skill sets but I see each hurdle as an opportunity to grow.
Tell us about your company. What does your business do and what are your responsibilities as a CEO?
Stephen Curran: Epistacks is an infrastructure as a service for start-up tech companies, we special Ed in creating infrastructure as code stacks and can be deployed anywhere on any cloud in minutes allowing our clients to scale when they need it and as cost-efficiently as possible. We also work with the companies and assist and advise their developers. In short, we are their DevOps team and will do everything in our laser to ensure success from day 0. As CEO I have the typical day-to-day structure but I love to spend time with my teams figuring out client problems and researching new solutions.
What does CEO stand for? Beyond the dictionary definition, how would you define it?
Stephen Curran: To me, a CEO is someone who takes pride in their employee’s work and their customer’s satisfaction a CEO should be the lighting rod of the company.
When you first became a CEO, how was it different from what you expected? What surprised you?
Stephen Curran: The weight in your shoulders surprised me a lot when your the head of a company you have a responsibility to your employees and your clients making it the most challenging career in a company for that same reason the most exciting.
There are many schools of thought as to what a CEO’s core roles and responsibilities are. Based on your experience, what are the main things a CEO should focus on? Explain and please share examples or stories to illustrate your vision.
Stephen Curran: In my opinion client success is the ultimate goal. in our line of work, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing your clients’ company grow and knowing you played a vital role in that growth, it is the most satisfying part of the job and it’s the reason for what we do.
How would you define success? Does it mean generating a certain amount of wealth, gaining a certain level of popularity, or helping a certain number of people?
Stephen Curran: For me, success is being able to help companies, I find it to be super rewarding. Watching a company grow from a small start-up to being a big multi-national company is the best reward imaginable.
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Some leadership skills are innate while others can be learned. What leadership skills do you possess innately and what skills have you cultivated over the years as a CEO?
Stephen Curran: I think a lot of people are able to lead for example people can lead a team and point teams in the right direction but the skill I have refined over the years is the ability to listen, listen to my employees, and their thoughts and ideas and listening to my clients and what they think is effective, a good CEO is a CEO that listens.
How did your role as a CEO help your business overcome challenges caused by the pandemic? Explain with practical examples.
Stephen Curran: The pandemic caused some communication challenges especially for new hires but we as a company were able to band to get her and learnt to create a amazing office environment.
Do you have any advice for aspiring CEOs and future leaders? What advice would you give a CEO that is just starting out on their journey?
Stephen Curran: Never stop learning, being able to learn from others and learn from your mistakes is in my opinion the most important thing when becoming a CEO.
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Before we finish things off, we have one final question for you. If you wrote a book about your life today, what would the title be?
Stephen Curran: For me it would be, “How to start small but think big”
Mike Weiss, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Stephen Curran for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Stephen Curran or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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