Meet Karen Gondoly of Leostream in Waltham

Today we’d like to introduce you to Karen Gondoly.

Karen, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My story begins as a public high school senior in Downriver Detroit, with an acceptance letter from MIT. Up until that point, I hadn’t entertained the idea of leaving Michigan, but I still remember how excited I was the day my acceptance arrived, and how I fell in love with Boston the moment I stepped off the plane.

MIT provided so many opportunities, not least among them the ability to say, “Why, yes, I am a Rocket Scientist!” (I have a B.S and M.S in Aeronautical Engineering.) I worked summers down at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia but, ultimately, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Boston. So, after graduation, I started my career here in Natick at the MathWorks.

The MathWorks offered a new set of challenges and opportunities for growth, and was a wonderful place to work for seven years. However, the death of a very close friend sent me down a path of self-reflection, and I ditched the high-tech world to pursue my dream of becoming a pastry chef. For a number of exciting years, I worked in various well-regarded restaurants in Boston, finally becoming the pastry chef at a high-end seafood restaurant.

Needless to say, it’s tough to pay the mortgage as a pastry chef. So, I utilized the skills I gained at the MathWorks to land freelance and contracting jobs in QA, technical writing, and other high-tech sundries.

Nine years ago, while still working at a Cambridge restaurant, I answered a Craigslist posting for a part-time technical writing position at a company called Leostream. My interviewer quickly noted my diverse background and, instead of offering me a part-time position, offered me a full-time job as Product Manager.

And, just like that, I was back in the high-tech world, again. I miss the pastries, but I do have more time to train and travel for my next goal – running a marathon in every state. (I’m up to 39!)

For eight years, I applied the skills I learned growing up in the Midwest and working in restaurant kitchens to Leostream. Work hard, work clean, and never assume someone else is going to pick up a task you drop on the floor. In 2016, the Leostream Board appointed me CEO.

It’s been an exciting 18 months since then, and our trajectory is up and up!

Has it been a smooth road?
A little known fact is that I actually left Leostream for a two month stint. I wanted to get back in touch with my Engineering roots, so I took a position that included Simulink modeling. It was interesting work, but, I missed my “LeoTeam”. So, when they recruited me back, I didn’t hesitate to return.

For a group consisting of, what can seem like, pretty disparate personalities, we work well together, complement each other’s strengths, and have learned to deal with each other’s weaknesses. Honing our team into a well-oiled machine was a process with struggles of its own, but that process leads us to a position where we are stronger together and are now seeing real growth.

As a woman in a STEM career, I find I’ve been lucky. It’s true that occasionally a visitor mistakes me for our office manager, or I get a look of disbelief when I introduce myself as the CEO. While the gender bias in a high-tech industry can be frustrating, I thankfully learned early on to just do my job and woe betide the person who tries to stop me.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Leostream story. Tell us more about the business.
Leostream provides a connection broker platform for hosted desktop deployments, what most people think of as Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, or VDI. Whereas other vendors in the VDI space provide the entire stack of technologies required to deploy VDI, we focus purely on providing a connection management platform, and then we allow our customers to build the remainder of their stack using whatever technologies best suit their needs.

Our goal is to keep a pulse on the industry, and integrate with the latest hosting platforms and display protocols that our customers want to use. For example, over the last couple of years, we noticed that enterprises were shifting workloads out of on-premises data centers and into public clouds. So, we added a suite of tools for managing capacity in cloud environments, like Amazon Web Services EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Now, our customers can build, connect to, and delete desktops in the cloud as their needs dictate.

Leostream just celebrated our 15 year anniversary in a market that’s dominated by a couple of very large players. Compared to the giants, we’re tiny, but that’s a testament to our technology, our staff, and our dedication to our customers.

Everyone at Leostream truly cares about the success of our customers. Our development team is lightweight and agile, so we bring features to market and put resolutions into our customer’s hands faster than anyone else in our space. Our customers love that about us and they love working with our professional and personal support team.

By and large, the quality of our support team and the speed of our response to customer needs sets our organization apart from anyone else in this space. The fact that our technology provides more flexibility and control for our customers doesn’t hurt, either.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
VDI never really saw the huge growth that the analysts predicted, and a large contributor to that lack of growth has been the cost. Implementing a full VDI stack in your data center is expensive. That’s one of the reasons, as I mentioned, enterprises are moving more and more workloads out of their data centers and into public or hosted clouds.

That trend is only going to continue. Also, platforms like OpenStack and Microsoft Azure Stack are going to give the legacy vendors in the VDI space a run for their money. Over the next five years, we’re going to see more and more organizations looking outside the box when it comes to where they will host their corporate desktop and application workloads, and how they will connect users to them.

As always, at Leostream, we plan to stay one step ahead of that trend!

Contact Info:

• Address: 271 Waverley Oaks Road,
  Suite 206, Waltham, MA 02454
• Website: www.leostream.com
• Phone: 781-890-2019
• Email: kgondoly@leostream.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeostreamCorp
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Leostream
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leostream-corporation

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