Zachary Smith, CEO and co-founder of Packet.
Zachary (Zac) has spent nearly 20 years building, running, and fixing public cloud infrastructure platforms.
A native of Southern California, Zac moved to New York at age 17 to study classical double bass at Juilliard. While commuting on the A train from Inwood to Columbus Circle, he taught himself Linux and the basics of servers, web hosting, and website/application development.
After graduation, and while working the night shift at Credit Suisse as a document prep expert, he became a co-owner of Voxel, one of the earliest Linux hosting startups.
Together with Raj Dutt the duo grew Voxel to more than 75 employees. When it was sold to Internap in 2011, it offered one of the most advanced bare metal and virtualized cloud offerings on the market as well as software product (Ubersmith) used by hundreds of datacenter and cloud businesses to automate their physical data center management and billing.
Early employees of Voxel leveraged their formative experience in those early days of cloud to lead infrastructure teams at companies along the lines of MediaMath, Facebook, and Etsy or to start new ventures including NS1 and Grafana Labs.
After spending a year running the cloud Business Unit at Internap, Zac left to pursue new adventures. While looking to leverage his experience in cloud, the guiding mantra for his next startup was “anything but infrastructure”. Alas, Zac’s passion led him back to cloud—and he co-founded Packet In 2014 with a vision to automate fundamental infrastructure for a world quickly being transformed by, well, the cloud.
Zac is responsible for the company's strategic roadmap and is most passionate about helping customers and partners innovate on infrastructure and about democratizing cloud-scale access to hardware innovation for enterprises and developers.
On any given day, you are likely to find Zac meeting an enterprise CIO about his/her 10-year tech plan; test-driving the latest addition to a Packet Terraform provider; outlining architecture on a new network design; and working with industry bigwigs to align supply chain for a new hardware delivery model. It’s one simple mission: He’s reinventing hardware for the millenial IT buyer.
Zac lives in Lower Manhattan with his wife and two young children. He is on the operating board of Pursuit, a nationally-known org helping low-income young adults ‘5X’ their incomes in one year by joining the tech workforce. He also proudly leads the Lower Manhattan Boy Scout Troop, which he founded in 2017.
2019 will be a transformative year for the wireless world, with landmark developments in 5G, cloud computing and hardware. From stadiums and retail buildings to airports and even street corners, there’s no ...