Portland tech executive Jim Gochee has landed a new role as CEO of Blameless, a site reliability engineering platform.
Blameless is based in San Mateo, California, but Gochee will be based in Portland.
Gochee is an alum of New Relic, where he spent 11 years and helped create and build that company’s large Portland office. He was CTO and was the highest ranking executive in the Portland office when he left New Relic in 2019.
There are no plans so far for targeted growth in Portland by Blameless, but Gochee said there were no initial plans for New Relic to grow here either.
"Portland wasn't a strategy at New Relic. It happened organically," he said. "I don't have any specific Portland plans yet but I would be really surprised if (Blameless) didn't grow out here to a degree."
With this new hire, Lyon Wong, Blameless’ current CEO and founder is moving to chairman of the company. Gochee said he was approached for the role by Wong. He noted he is looking forward to working closely with Wong.
Blameless makes software used by engineering teams to maintain reliability of sites and applications. It offers automated workflow, incident management, communication and data insights. The company was founded in 2017. It has raised $50 million from investors, according to Crunchbase.
“As Blameless continues its rapid growth, I believe that now is the best time to add someone like Jim to the executive team. Myself and the rest of the board are excited to have found Jim and he is the right fit to join the exceptional executive team already assembled,” Wong said in a written statement. “I recruited Jim because he brings a great level of empathy for customers and their issues. He knows the challenges that SRE teams face and has handled his share of major incidents.”
In addition to CTO, Gochee was previously vice president of engineering and chief product officer at New Relic. He helped take that company public in 2014 and in 2016 helped launch a site reliability engineering practice.
Gochee said his goal is to get Blameless’ software into as many engineering teams as possible.
“Reliability is fundamental to every digital experience, and it starts with strong incident management rigor,” he said. “Every on-call engineer needs steps to follow, support along the way, and the ability to capture data for later analysis. I’m excited about the value we’re delivering to our customers, and I look forward to helping them mature their reliability practices.”
Gochee joined New Relic when it was under 10 employees. By the time he left that was around 1,700. He has been involved in startups through scaling and an IPO. He said he is excited to get back to a company at the stage of Blameless, with fewer than 100 employees.
"It's great going back to something this size. I loved all the stages of the New Relic journey," he said. "The early days of New Relic were some of my favorite. This reminds me of that."
