About this site

Not A Tech Bro is a newsletter published by me, Mike Olson. I talk about social and economic issues at a time when MAGA challenges many of the socially liberal policies that characterized the tech industry during my career.

I came to California in 1979 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. I eventually earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the institution. I dropped out of the PhD program in EECS to join a startup company commercializing the research we had been doing on database technology.

I started in a hands-on programming role and then took on a series of more customer-facing jobs, helping our sales team position and sell the product. I moved into engineering management, then into leadership roles in marketing and sales, before being named CEO of my company in the early 2000s. I co-founded a tech startup named Cloudera in 2008 and served as CEO there for five years before moving to chief strategy officer.

I retired from Cloudera in 2019 and have no operating role anywhere now. My lack of entanglements makes it easier for me to speak frankly than many of my former peers in industry.

Not A Tech Bro is where I do that.

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