I think what happened to docker is a bit unfortunate. March 2013 — Docker goes public/open source at PyCon Nov 2013 — Jerry Chen pursues Docker, leads to Greylock Series B - Jan 2014 — Greylock Series B closes ($15M) - June 2014 — Kubernetes announced - July 2015 — Kubernetes 1.0 released.

Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.