Charlotte Pearson
- Former Nvidia engineer Derek Fulton quit his job to launch the family cloud startup Carolina Cloud.
- Fulton said learning plateaued at the chip giant, and the money wasn't life-changing.
- He said the decision has improved his mental health and rekindled his love of technology.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Derek Fulton, 31, a former Nvidia software engineer who quit to found the North Carolina-based cloud startup Carolina Cloud with his wife. Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment about its work culture. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I've been messing around with computers since I got my first MacBook in 2006 at age 11. From building potato cannons to flying drones, I always wanted to solve problems and build things.
After college, I worked in data science at a European bank and as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund specializing in mortgage investments.
When a friend from college who worked at Nvidia posted on LinkedIn about a software engineering opportunity, I knew I had to apply. I've always been a technologist at heart, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.
When I first joined, I felt like I was learning a good bit. It was the first time I was on a team where software was the final product and not just an internal tool — where getting the last mile right really mattered.
But after a few months, I felt like I wasn't learning anymore. There was a top-down management style and a nitpicky, boxed-in way of working. I worked on a lot of bugs and features, and when I asked to work on different projects that I wasn't familiar with, I was told no.
People assume that if you work at Nvidia, you make a lot of money. My package was in the low six figures, and the wide disparities in pay between older and newer employees impacted the culture because we were all playing different games.
The way I view a job is I want to either be learning or earning. I joined late enough that the money wasn't life-changing, and I felt I could get another job that paid roughly the same amount if it ever came to that. Also, our cost of living is reasonable in the Raleigh-Durham area, and my wife and I are both pretty fiscally shrewd.
Reconnecting with my love for technology
I always knew I would launch my own company one day. One of my ambitions was to command my own time by the age of 30 and to have kids who could grow up seeing me do that every day.
My wife and I invested about $20,000 to found our family-owned cloud provider, Carolina Cloud. We're bootstrapping for now, but aren't opposed to raising a small round down the line if we fill our current server fleet.
Carolina Cloud does offer GPUs, but we're focused on CPUs because we believe they absolutely aren't going anywhere: they're less finicky, use less power, are cheaper, and last for years.
At previous jobs where we'd rented cloud, the prices were so high compared to what I knew it would cost to actually build one of the computers, so I saw an opportunity to create a provider that delivered value while still making money.
Carolina Cloud is focused on on-demand, high-performance compute. Some of our early customers are hedge funds and genomics companies, particularly in the Research Triangle. We differentiate from hyperscalers with lower pricing, no egress fees, and high-touch support.
Quitting my job at Nvidia has turned out to be a boon for my mental health. After a couple of weeks, I started sleeping better, chatting with strangers in public, spontaneously running errands I'd forgotten about, and calling people I hadn't thought about in years.
I've also been working really hard, but on my own terms, which has allowed me to reconnect with my love for technology.
While it takes time to get a business off the ground, I told myself that if we didn't turn a profit in 18 months, I could go back to a traditional job. But right now, early interest has gone as expected and indicates that we should be able to stay the course.
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