Caylent is a cloud native services company that helps organizations bring the best out of their people and technology using AWS. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Caylent CTO Randall Hunt to learn more about the company.
Randall Hunt’s Background
What is Randall Hunt’s background? Hunt said:
“I started programming in middle school, initially to hack into some of the early Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Over time, it became less about the games and more about the programming itself. I pursued physics and computer science at Western Carolina University, which led to a summer internship at NASA Langley. There, I worked on designing and implementing a mass properties Application Programming Interface (API) and, weirdly, testing the behavior of ping pong balls in a vacuum and at extreme temperatures. That experience helped me realize I enjoyed the profession of programming much more than the profession of physics, so I joined NASA Ames’ Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) for a semester, where I was able to do a lot of work in Python.”
“Following that, I participated in a summer fellowship through hackNY in NYC, where I built an SVD-based restaurant recommendation machine learning (ML) model for a startup called SpotOn. During that summer, I met Eliot Horowitz, the founder of MongoDB, which led me to drop out of school and join MongoDB full-time. At MongoDB, I wore many hats, gaining exposure to various aspects of technology and business.”
“After several years, I joined AWS as a technical evangelist. My role involved writing blog posts, building demos, giving talks, and traveling the world. I loved both AWS and the job. About a year into my time there, a SpaceX recruiter reached out. I had applied to SpaceX 10 times before without success, I had never made it past the onsite interview. This time I did succeed, and I joined SpaceX. At SpaceX, I managed their AWS usage and the flight software CI/CD team. I was fortunate to be there for the first several Falcon 9 landings. It was an intense but immensely rewarding experience, where I learned a great deal.”
“As SpaceX began to pivot away from AWS, I decided to return to AWS to continue to focus my career on cloud technology. Over the years at AWS, I spoke with thousands of customers across 50+ countries and contributed to 180+ service and feature launches. We got to design and build systems capable of handling billions of requests per second, globally. 2016 to 2020 was a very good time to be at AWS, the growth and pace of innovation were exceptional. The Amazon leadership principles and culture are peculiar and unique. At AWS they focus on a bias for action and a preference for writing over presentations. Clear, written-thought is valued over a flashy powerpoint. Those concepts continue to inform my day-to-day actions.”
“After AWS, I joined Meta to work on the PyTorch team. I was impressed by the initial advancements in language models (pre-ChatGPT) and wanted to contribute to PyTorch, a framework central to the AI research community. After my time at Meta, I invested in several startups, took some time off to be a ski bum, and eventually found my way to Caylent. I remember I signed my offer letter on a chairlift in Mammoth.”
“Fast forward to the present day, joining Caylent has been the best decision of my career to-date. Each step of my journey has been filled with fantastic memories and incredible colleagues, and I feel fortunate to have worked at such amazing places.”
“I wear a lot of hats. The long-term strategy of my role involves staying ahead of the market on technology and understanding how Caylent can continue to differentiate itself technically from our competitors. Questions I often ask myself include: How can we constantly be improving without changing the fundamentals that got us to where we are? How do we scale? How do we grow well?. Some of that long-term strategy involves meeting with many AWS product teams to understand what they’re working on and how it might apply to current or potential customers. The tactical day-to-day involves everything from managing escalations (internal and customer), providing training for our delivery teams, diving deep on a new AWS release, working on sales or marketing content, supporting sales pursuits, supporting customer deployments, to helping with IT initiatives.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Hunt reflected:
“On June 9th of 2022 we were in New York City when we learned Caylent had earned our AWS Premier Tier designation. This was the milestone that unlocked all of our subsequent success. At the time, it felt incredible, in hindsight, it seems even more incredible. I don’t think any other AWS Partner has ever accomplished that goal as quickly as Caylent. I knew then that we were on to something exceptional.”
“My second favorite moment in Caylent’s history was very recent. Val Henderson, our president and CRO, presented on stage at AWS re:Invent. Val presented Caylent’s history and evolution into AWS’s most trusted SI partner. If June 9 of 2022 was when I knew we were on to something then December 4 of 2024 is when I knew we were winning.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Hunt explained:
“Caylent helps businesses turn their ideas into impact, faster. We build cool stuff. If a customer has an idea or a need then they come to us to get it done. We’re an all-in-one AWS premier tier consulting partner and we work across everything – from product strategy to frontend, backend, to heterogeneous database migrations. We are biased for hiring passionate autodidacts who have an innate curiosity and desire to work across many different fields. Our goal isn’t just to be the best AWS consulting partner, but to be the only consulting partner that can do the things we do (shout out to Val and Jerry Garcia).”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Hunt and the team faced in building the company? Hunt acknowledged:
“I actually believe the recent macroeconomic turmoil benefited Caylent by giving us an opportunity to talk to customers who otherwise would have continued to be plagued by legacy consulting partners. We’ve grown massively over the last several years, and with this massive growth, it can be hard to maintain our unique culture. Maintaining that culture is vital to our success because customers don’t choose Caylent because we’re competitive in price, they choose Caylent over Accenture or Deloitte because of our unique experience, culture and bias for action.”
“We’ve expanded into product strategy, UI/UX, cloud-native application development, and GenAI and we don’t need to convince the best talent in the industry to join us. They join us because they have the opportunity to build something new, free of the legacy organizational and technical debt of our predecessors. Caylent survives by constantly raising the bar. We overcome challenges, as corny as it sounds, by rising together, one of our core values, and fearlessly questioning the assumptions of the past.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Hunt noted:
“Since launching, we have introduced new service offerings and solutions to meet customers’ needs through the various eras of cloud modernization. We have also introduced them at pace with AWS’ product innovations. We have leaned into AWS’ custom silicon-like graviton early on and helped customers achieve massive price/performance savings in their infrastructure.”
“In this era of AI, it’s important now more than ever to adapt with speed. There is a real possibility that businesses will fail faster than ever if they don’t evolve.”
“We found the careful balance between organizational evolution and disruption. Growing too fast without a scalable operational backbone could lead to disruptions. Innovating too quickly without the organizational muscle memory for adaptation could lead to dissonance.”
“We balanced our rapid growth from 50 employees to 650 by evolving our talent, operations and business strategy to deliver the greatest value for our customers.”
“It starts with building a culture of curiosity and continuous learning, what we call ‘The Caylent Way.’ This has built the organizational muscle-memory needed to adapt to new technologies like GenAI. We also pride ourselves in not being like a typical IT vendor, we truly partner with our customers to accelerate their cloud evolution journey by “Doing-with” vs “Doing for”. We enable and educate their teams along the whole development and deployment process so they are confident in managing and operating the solution after the engagement ends.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Hunt about customer success stories, he cited the following:
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Hunt affirmed:
“Caylent is the only company that does what we do at this level of quality. Our people and our culture are why customers choose Caylent. Our tight alignment with AWS keeps us ahead of the competition and focused on the latest and greatest features that can materially improve our customer’s applications and infrastructure. We’re an innovation engine for the cloud, and customers work with us to jumpstart their own innovation.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Hunt emphasized:
“We want to write the playbook for modern AI-driven tech services. This year, we plan to double down on AI solutions for Applied AI, internal process automation, generative AI-powered processes, and the Caylent Delivery Platform. These investments will streamline customer engagements, optimize delivery cycles, and ensure our teams have the tools and support they need to consistently deliver excellence.”
“We are also seeing trends on the agentic AI, and would like to build applications for our customers across various industries, from software to retail, to use AI for problem solving, reasoning, planning and execution.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Hunt concluded:
“The constantly evolving unit economics of Generative AI are extremely interesting right now. People should pay close attention to what’s happening there.”
