Farewell Golioth... and Hello Nordic! · Daniel Mangum

Friday was my last day at Golioth (and<br>Canonical), and today is my first day at Nordic<br>Semiconductor! It has been an interesting journey to<br>say the least, but before diving into what drew me to Nordic, I would be remiss<br>not to briefly reflect on my time at Golioth.

I joined Golioth after a few years at Upbound, where I<br>spent the majority of my time working on the open source Crossplane<br>project, before eventually moving over to lead<br>teams that built Upbound Cloud and the Upbound<br>Marketplace. It was a tremendous experience,<br>but I found myself spending more and more time working with FPGAs, learning<br>about chip design, and generally gravitating towards hardware. I knew that no<br>matter how great Upbound was, I wanted to be &ldquo;closer to the metal&rdquo;. I had known<br>Jonathan for a few years, and I<br>finally decided to take a leap of<br>faith and join him and the team<br>at Golioth to begin that journey.

Though I was coming from a startup background and was very comfortable with<br>&ldquo;wearing all the hats&rdquo;, Golioth took that philosophy to a new level. We built<br>scalable cloud systems ingesting large volumes of data from embedded devices all<br>over the world. We wrote firmware SDKs that ran on countless variations of<br>microcontrollers and supported multiple real-time operating systems. We designed<br>reference hardware for our customers and helped them adapt it to their own<br>specific requirements. In a given day, I could be deploying new cloud<br>infrastructure, testing the impact of a firmware change on cellular<br>connectivity, reviewing a board schematic, and more. As someone who has no<br>shortage of interests, this was truly a joy.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of working on Golioth was the management and<br>leadership responsibilities that were entrusted to me. While I had lead teams of<br>engineers in the past, I eventually stepped into the CTO role at Golioth, making<br>me the final decision maker on and ultimately responsible for all technical<br>direction and engineering personnel matters. Fortunately, I was surrounded by a<br>group of highly experienced engineers, and more importantly, excellent people,<br>who extended grace to me as I grew into the role. While I am as hands on as they<br>come when it comes to technical leadership, some of the best experiences I had<br>at Golioth were managing difficult non-technical situations with members of the<br>team, whether related to mistakes that we had made, or external factors that<br>constrained our resources. While my tenure was by no means flawless, I do feel<br>confident that we treated every member of the team with respect and always<br>operated with their best interests at heart. I hope they also feel as though<br>that was the case.

At the beginning of 2026 we entered into an agreement to be<br>acquired by<br>Canonical. The months leading up to that decision were the hardest of my<br>professional life. I spent less time building and much more time in meetings,<br>many of which involved navigating constraints and determining what the best<br>outcome would look like for the company and the team. I learned a ton during<br>this period, and we were incredibly fortunate to have Jonathan at the helm. I<br>had the luxury of knowing that Jonathan and I were aligned in our values, and<br>though it was a difficult time for me personally, he shouldered the vast<br>majority of the load. Many of them will never be shared publicly, but the<br>sacrifices that were made during that time were far beyond what most would<br>consider reasonable or expected.

Landing at Canonical was an adjustment. While still a relatively small company,<br>Canonical is two orders of magnitude larger than what our headcount was at<br>Golioth. Though some have now moved on to new opportunities, I felt proud that<br>the entire team was willing to join the new adventure, and came in with fairly<br>open minds despite non-ideal circumstances. If anything, having the opportunity<br>to observe the Golioth team within the context of the Canonical organization<br>reinforced the high caliber technical acumen and uncompromising character of<br>each individual to me. I&rsquo;m grateful to Canonical for taking a chance on our<br>small team, and I&rsquo;m grateful to our team for taking a chance on a different path<br>than we expected. I remain incredibly optimistic about the technical direction<br>of the Golioth team, as well as its sibling teams, within Canonical.

Shortly after joining Golioth, I wrote a blog post entitled A Three Year Bet on<br>Chip Design.<br>While I failed to follow through on some of the goals enumerated in that post, I<br>have learned more about chip design, and hardware manufacturing generally, than<br>I could have hoped for in the past three years. Some of that was through our own<br>work at Golioth, while other experience came through interaction with customers<br>and partners, many of whom were semiconductor companies. This has only<br>reinforced my passion for the space and my desire to be a technical leader at<br>the &ldquo;lowest level&rdquo; of...