Turning Blame into an Opportunity to Learn with Lyon Wong

The Business of Open Source

Lyon Wong, CEO and co-founder of Blameless, a complete reliability engineering platform that brings together AI-driven incident resolution, blameless retrospectives, SLOs/Error Budgets, and reliability insights reports and dashboards that enable businesses to optimize reliability and innovation. Lyon has a history steeped in founding and investing in start ups and company building, which has lead a heavy involvement in Blameless where he can apply the many lessons learned.

In this episode, Lyon breaks down his background and how it influenced his decision to become a founder at Blameless. Over the course of his career he noticed trends in other companies where teams were prevented from learning opportunities because they were worried about catching the blame. As a result Lyon identified the need in the market for a way to synthesize the cultural tensions around blame. Lyon’s insight on building trust, partnership, and communications on learning are deep and worthwhile. Check out the full conversation!

Highlights:

• An introduction to Lyon and Blameless (00:00)
• Jumping back into being a founder after time as a VC (2:28)
• Creating a blameless culture (05:50)
• What Lyon does different as a founder and investor and his early experiences (09:50)
• The importance of credibility (16:10)
• The “core skillsets” needed in start ups and some crucial beliefs (18:55)
• The larger and smaller pictures, and balancing short and long term (25:34)
• Lyon’s parting words and wisdom for founders (32:51)