Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Duvall.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Jeremy. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I come from a small town in North Georgia where I was raised on a farm doing interesting “farm” things. My mother died when I was very young in a car accident–I was in that accident and luckily survived–so my sister and I were raised by our father and grandmothers. Dad was an excellent example of “working one’s ass off” to help his two children survive and make it through school. Growing up on a farm in the beautiful north Georgia mountains has its distinct advantages. I was always outside playing in the fruit trees dispatching imaginary foes; I was a very introverted child.
Middle school was typical for any awkward introverted kid growing up in a small town. I spent most of my free time in my room sounding out Metallica and Stevie Ray Vaughn covers with my $100 off-brand Telecaster. and my Fender Champ amp. High school was great in a small town. I was known simply as “the kid who plays guitar,” mostly due to my friends and I playing AC/DC, Metallica, and Georgia Satellites tunes in talent shows.
Academically I did well in classes and eventually enrolling in Young Harris College as a post-secondary options student. I spent my senior year taking Calculus and physics classes at the college and I met Dr. Bob Nichols, the man who would challenge me in ways I had never been challenged before.
Upon graduating from high school the next logical step was to finish my associate’s degree from YHC and figure out who I wanted to be when I grew up. I completed my associate’s degree studies there while being heavily mentored by Dr. Nichols and Dr. Fox and pointed towards Georgia Tech as my next destination. So I applied. Most people apply to tens of schools, do site visits, chat with professors; not me. I knew where I wanted to go. So either out of stupidity or bravado the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology was the only school I applied to. Luckily, I got in!
At the end of my first semester at Georgia Tech, I joined the square root club. That is, where the square root of your GPA is greater than your GPA. For the first time in my academic career, I faced extreme failure, and it was devastating. Never mind the fact that I took 5 CS courses taught by luminaries like Bill Leahey and Mark Guzdial, I incredibly underestimated the work it took to be a successful Ramblin’ Wreck. However, years of watching a single Father drive a truck for an entire week so he could send his kids to school taught me to never give up. So I tried again. My second semester was only slightly better, and my confidence crashed farther.
At this point, I was put on academic probation and needed to swing a 2.3 in order to be able to graduate given my remaining courses. The third pitch? A swing and a miss. I was removed from Georgia Tech and I drove back to my little hometown dejected and confused.
I spent a summer working as a cashier at the local Ingles–which proudly asserts itself as the highest grossing Ingles in Georgia at the time. After seeing so many of my high school classmates chatting about their future careers and direction I realized that I had lost something very precious to me. Determined, I reapplied to Tech through the academic appeals process. I wrote a letter outlining a plan for graduating based on my current standing and mailed it to my former professors. In their grace, they let me back in!
From there, I was a different human. My first semester back I scored a 4.0 while taking 5 CS courses including a notoriously difficult Java class taught by a certain notoriously difficult professor. Next, I worked with Dr. Keith Edwards and Dr. Melody Jackson-Moore in their research labs to build some very cool projects. I won the Presidents Undergraduate Research Award for some work I completed for Keith’s Pixi lab–a $5000 scholarship! I graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology in 6 years with a 2.98 GPA.
Upon graduation, I landed a job with a little west coast company called Danger, Inc. That job introduced me to some of the smartest people on the planet, folks that would shape my career and show me how to be truly a helluva engineer.
Has it been a smooth road?
True success is usually a direct result of some kind of failure in my experience. In almost every instance in my life where I’ve struggled, there’s been some other human there to help myself or my family. From failing out of Tech to figuring out how to grow up in a single-parent household: I’ve never really felt like my life has been unfair. If anything I grew up much better off than some other folks I’ve come to call friends so I treasure my roots and every bump I’ve experienced.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the 7Factor Software story. Tell us more about the business.
I started 7Factor in March of 2017 after working in a few startups and for some of the big guys. I had just left another startup company that required me to travel during all of 2016 and after several discussions with my wife decided that wasn’t something I wanted to continue doing. Initially, I just wanted to pay the bills but a friend and CEO of another company bootstrapped my first project by investing in us for a small product. From there we grew pretty quickly to 2 FTEs by the end of December, and now we’re at 7FTEs and working for some of the largest companies in Atlanta and Denver. It’s been an awesome ride.
In a nutshell, we’re a DevOps enabled cloud-based software development shop. We focus on enhancing our client’s ability to innovate and quality first execution. We have a broad skill set ranging from enhancing our client’s infrastructure with high availability enterprise architecture, building products using modern delivery methods, to tiger team product engineering.
We’re primarily known for being candid, human-centric partners with an obsession for quality. We’ve built products in AWS and GCP utilizing our own containerized SDLC, implemented big data solutions utilizing best in class products, coached delivery teams on extreme programming principles, and built continuous delivery pipelines to speed a teams time to market. We’re at our heart a software development company and always will be; it’s not a competency that we bolted on the side of our company. This is a key advantage because we can execute and understand enterprise-class software delivery strategies and we employ them in our everyday work. Couple this with our size and we can offer an equal or better level of service than the big guys to startup through mid-cap companies who are often budget constrained but have the same needs as our enterprise customers.
We are most proud of the core values of our company, which are outlined in this public GitHub repository for the world to see: https://github.com/7Factor/7factor. Those values define how we go to the market and how we treat ourselves, our colleagues, and our clients. We are a human-centric company with a laser focus on customer service and high-quality engineering work, and we’ve found our clients very much appreciate the balance we strike between delivery and obsession. We have data to back that up too, 95% of our clients are repeat or referral business. We have zero marketing presence, as demonstrated by our very bare website (don’t worry, we’re working on that for 2019)!
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Machine learning is the new hot-off-the-press buzzword commanding extremely high salaries and attracting lots of my friends in the valley, and I think this will eventually settling into a common piece of enterprise analytics and decision making processes.
Some hot new startups are doing some incredible things with it, and some of the old guards are figuring out how to pivot their massive ships to pull in interesting implementations to fend off the disruptors. The platform as a service (PaaS) game is heating up as well since Google released more interesting features in Kubernetes. AWS even bought in and pushed the EKS service out in tandem with their own ECS and Fargate services.
I think we’ll see a little less PCF market share moving forward as well. Folks who have bought into AWS and GCP that are unable to swing the high licensing fees of PCF will find the various built-in application platforms of those cloud systems orders of magnitude more affordable. PCF is a good product, however, so I definitely don’t think enterprises who have invested in it will abandon wholesale.
I think we’ll start seeing more mature multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations as that strategy becomes more accessible and easier to manage. Technology is a fast-paced game though, so honestly, who knows? No matter where we end up the 7F crew will keep riding the wave and skilling up to the cutting edge!
Contact Info:
- Address: 1050 Crown Pointe Parkway
- Website: https://www.7factor.io
- Phone: (678) 829-7412
- Email: contact@7factor.io
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/7fsoft/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/7fsoft?lang=en
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