Aug 19, 2026 · 45 min · 11 segments
TechPod Talks producer Lauren Dort turns the mic on host Stephen Koza, CEO of EverOps. Stephen traces his path from electrical engineering student at UT Austin to enterprise sales, through Silicon…
Stephen KozaGuest
Lauren DortHost
This is the show for engineers and technical leaders in the trenches, the people building platforms, running cloud, scaling infrastructure, and figuring out what's next.
Every episode, I sit down with somebody who's actually doing the work to get the real story.
[upbeat music] There's a version of a career that looks like a series of accidents from the outside until it suddenly doesn't.
An electrical engineer who pivoted to sales, spent years in enterprise hardware and managed services, landed in Silicon Valley, caught the startup bug, became an investor, and ended up as a CEO, not by founding a company, but by acquiring one.
Welcome to TechPod Talks, candid conversations with leaders building what's next.
I'm Lauren Dort, and yes, today, I am interviewing the host of this very podcast.
For those of you who listen regularly, Steven usually sits in this chair, asks the questions, and keeps everyone honest, but not today.
I've known Steven since our days at Cisco Meraki, which means I have both the context and let's call them the receipts.
Every episode, he brings in a practitioner who's actually in the arena to share what's really happening in platform engineering, DevOps, and cloud.
So Steven has one of the less predictable career paths we've seen in technology leadership, and it makes more sense the further back you look.
He started by studying electrical engineering at UT Austin, took his first job as an engineer, and then lobbied his way into sales about a year in because he realized that's where he actually really wanted to be.
He spent the next several years in enterprise sales and leadership, which eventually brought him from Texas to San Francisco and into the kind of environment where coffee shop conversations revolve around term sheets rather than just earning calls.
He joined a series of fast-moving technology companies, one of which was acquired by Cisco and another of which went public, and he's described those years as an MBA in entrepreneurship.
After that, instead of founding a startup the way most people in Silicon Valley would, he started an investment firm, found the right company, put capital into it, and joined as CEO.
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This is the show for engineers and technical leaders in the trenches, the people building platforms, running cloud, scaling infrastructure, and figuring out what's next.
Every episode, I sit down with somebody who's actually doing the work to get the real story.
[upbeat music] There's a version of a career that looks like a series of accidents from the outside until it suddenly doesn't.
An electrical engineer who pivoted to sales, spent years in enterprise hardware and managed services, landed in Silicon Valley, caught the startup bug, became an investor, and ended up as a CEO, not by founding a company, but by acquiring one.
Welcome to TechPod Talks, candid conversations with leaders building what's next.
I'm Lauren Dort, and yes, today, I am interviewing the host of this very podcast.
For those of you who listen regularly, Steven usually sits in this chair, asks the questions, and keeps everyone honest, but not today.
I've known Steven since our days at Cisco Meraki, which means I have both the context and let's call them the receipts.
Every episode, he brings in a practitioner who's actually in the arena to share what's really happening in platform engineering, DevOps, and cloud.
So Steven has one of the less predictable career paths we've seen in technology leadership, and it makes more sense the further back you look.
He started by studying electrical engineering at UT Austin, took his first job as an engineer, and then lobbied his way into sales about a year in because he realized that's where he actually really wanted to be.
He spent the next several years in enterprise sales and leadership, which eventually brought him from Texas to San Francisco and into the kind of environment where coffee shop conversations revolve around term sheets rather than just earning calls.
He joined a series of fast-moving technology companies, one of which was acquired by Cisco and another of which went public, and he's described those years as an MBA in entrepreneurship.
After that, instead of founding a startup the way most people in Silicon Valley would, he started an investment firm, found the right company, put capital into it, and joined as CEO.
