Why This Founder Keeps Going Back Into the Fire

Why This Founder Keeps Going Back Into the Fire

The Setup

In 2016, NS1 was eighteen people providing DNS for some of the biggest properties on the internet, and for an entire month attackers tried to take it down around the clock. The team made calls off dashboards on the wall: turn off that customer, they are the target right now, sacrifice one important website to save the rest. Kris Beevers calls that month one of his fondest memories of the company. He sold NS1 to IBM in 2023, then started company number four. He is now co-founder and CEO of NetBox Labs, the commercial company behind open source NetBox, which is used by infrastructure teams across the world. Four startups in, he has never once considered stopping.

The Right Kind of Hard

Founders ask constantly how to tell productive pain from plain failure. Kris's test is simple and unforgiving. "If you are having fun while it is hard, that might be for you. If every day you wake up and you're like, oh God, gotta keep doing this stupid thing, get out of there."

He pushes it further. If a week goes by without an "oh God, we're screwed" moment, you are not swinging big enough. The goal is to find the edge of chaos you can tolerate and operate just inside it, not to avoid it.

One warning comes with that. After enough fires the scar tissue gets thick, and a CEO can stop feeling what the team feels. Kris's rule is to stay desensitized to routine chaos but keep enough feeling to recognize when something genuinely hurts the people around you, and say so.

The Accountant Is Wrong

A founder wrote in with thousands of GitHub stars, a Fortune 500 running the project in production, no revenue, and an accountant calling the community a cost center. Kris's answer: the accountant is wrong, and so is the investor who called it only a moat. An open source community is distribution, and distribution gives you market signal, product signal, brand, and reach. When NetBox Labs builds a new product, it asks the community whether the problem is real and how they want it solved. A hundred-billion-dollar company would envy that.

The business side is where he is strict. NetBox Labs decided at the outset that it would make money one way: product licenses. No paid support, no professional services around the open source project. He thinks that incentive alignment is wrong for the company he wants to build. The community will evaporate if the company does not make money, so the model has to be chosen deliberately, and he leans on a board full of commercial open source veterans to avoid repeating twenty years of other people's mistakes.

He is also honest that he found NetBox the easy way. At NS1, every customer asked whether the new products worked with NetBox. That was the signal.

Friends or Co-founders, Pick One

Startup number two was a building materials company in Massachusetts, started with college friends who wanted a company but had no idea. Months in, broke, filing grants and twenty years from a customer, Kris realized the people across the whiteboard were going to be either his co-founders or his friends. He wanted the friends. They killed the business.

Every co-founder since has come from years of working together. His NS1 co-founders were former colleagues, and the NetBox Labs founders all came from NS1. The real filter is whether you can have the hard conversation, like the one in a lower Manhattan coffee shop where he told a co-founder, "You're either doing this or you're not." If you cannot do that at the start, you will not survive the cash crunch five years later.

Engineers Love Technology, Entrepreneurs Love Problems

The thing Kris had to unlearn was gravity toward the tech. He still writes code and will not stop, and he thinks any founder not building things right now does not understand what building means anymore. But he does not care how a product gets built, and he will throw away code the moment the problem is solved. Software that takes five minutes and no insight is not value. The insight and the customer problem are.

What Would He Do Differently

What worked: staying in the domain he naturally gravitates to, letting each business surface the next one's problems, choosing a single revenue model early, and keeping co-founders who could fight well. What he would change is the wood company, which taught him that loving a problem is not the same as belonging in its industry. On the three-year-old company stuck at "fine," his advice is to listen to the market and change something. If you are out of ideas, wind it up. You only get so many swings, and life goes on. When will he stop starting companies? "Dead."