Billion-dollar startup Docker's opportunity to lead the rush in IT to a technology called containers rests in the firm control of CEO Ben
But the company's soul is the responsibility of Solomon Hykes. A bearded, lightly-accented computer scientist with a fondness for motorcycles, Hykes took an unusual journey from running servers as a teenager in France to cofounder and CTO of the startup many call software's next big thing.
Docker's story, and its unique opportunity, are detailed in the July 20 issue of Forbes, How Docker Escaped Near-Death To Become Software's Next Big Thing. But there's plenty more to Hykes' history and his startup's early days. Here are some of the highlights.
A "citizen of the world." A fictional Frenchman uses the famous line to describe Humphrey Bogart's character in 'Casablanca,' but the phrase could aptly describe Solomon Hykes. Known as a French founder in Silicon Valley who came to the U.S. to attend Y Combinator, Hykes has actually had a few stints stateside in his life. Hykes was born in New York City to an American father and French-Canadian mother before moving to France at the age of four. A computer science graduate in Paris, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego early in his college career and worked a stint in Los Angeles for a French movie company before returning to Paris.
Hykes ran servers at an Internet cafe for free credit. A coder since he was seven, Hykes would spend hours playing his friends in games like Warcraft, StarCraft and Duke Nukem at an Internet cafe close to home. That's how he got his first job–as its teenage systems administrator, running the cafe's servers for free access in a barter he would echo later at YC, where he took fellow startup's Amazon Web Services credits to use his product. "I would try a new script and everyone in the cafe would say, 'Why is the Internet down?' and I would discreetly roll it back," Hykes tells Forbes. "So I shifted my time from gaming to programming."
Y Combinator wasn't easy to convince. Hykes and his cofounders first applied for the winter of 2010 and were denied. They had no luck at first with the summer session, either. But then at the last minute, program cofounder Paul Graham changed his mind. It was Graham who had the idea to make the other YC startups early customers in exchange for their Amazon Web Services credits. His message to Hykes to do whatever it took to get his peers signed up was blunt: "You should be their bitches."
Hykes had a cofounder who's now at a partner company. Docker fashions Hykes its "founder" as he was alone in charge when the company changed from dotCloud. But a friend,Sebastien Pahl, cofounded dotCloud and left months after its Series A funding round at the end of 2011. Pahl now works at a major Docker partner, Mesosphere. "He's excited just like me," says Hykes about Pahl, who declined to be interviewed for Forbes' story. "He's an outspoken proponent of Docker today."
DotCloud was a "boiling frog." That's how Hykes and early investor Peter Fenton of Benchmark now describe dotCloud as it struggled in 2012. Put a frog in water and gradually heat it, the folk legend goes, and the frog won't notice that it's being cooked until it's too late. "We never had a board meeting with high fives. We always had something to prove," says Hykes now. "You're constantly faced with the dilemma to stay the course or reconsider. You never know when you're this close to succeeding."
A motorcycle helped Hykes take a chance. Hykes now looks the part of the leader of a movement with his trimmed beard, leather jacket and motorcycle. But the first time he rode it, Hykes was about to take a major chance by presenting the young Docker project at a lightning pitch conference in Santa Clara when the crowd expected a talk on dotCloud. "That's the first day I used my motorcycle," says Hykes. "I remember thinking on my way there, I guess this is the day to take risks."
Hykes never liked Docker's name. People who load and unload commercial ships are often referred to as "dockers" in Britain, but the term's less familiar in the U.S., where Docker's faced early confusion for its shared name with Dockers khaki pants. But thinking of the dock workers, the first engineer assigned to work with Hykes on the then-side project dubbed it Docker to riff off the containers term. Hykes says now: "I thought it was a terrible name and that we would change it before we released it." Instead, apps housed in Docker containers have been downloaded 535 million times so far. Longshoreman doesn't have the same ring to it.
