Joseph Ruscio

Joseph Ruscio is a General Partner at Heavybit. With more than 20 years of experience in academia, startups, and the enterprise, Joe is an expert in distributed systems, scaling high-performing organizations, and developer-first go-to-markets.

Joe has been working with Heavybit since 2013 when he joined the Heavybit portfolio as a Founder and CTO of Librato, one of the first cloud-native, infrastructure monitoring companies with an API-first approach to telemetry. He was responsible for the company's core product vision, R&D, and community-led growth. Librato rapidly scaled to thousands of customers and was acquired for $40m by SolarWinds (a public provider of IT monitoring and management tools) in early 2015. At SolarWinds, he took a leadership role in the firm’s nascent Cloud business division of SaaS offerings built for developers/operators working on modern, cloud-native architectures. Over the next several years he helped lead product strategy, scale R&D, and drive/integrate multiple strategic acquisitions including the likes of Papertrail, Tracelytics, and Loggly. Joe then joined Heavybit full-time as a General Partner in April 2018.

Joe works on the boards of Heavybit-backed companies like Tailscale, Localstack, Groundcover, and Partnerpage among others. He is passionate about products that give technical practitioners “superpowers” and remove any and all toil not related to their business’s core competencies. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech where he dropped out of a PhD program to focus on entrepreneurship. After a decade in San Francisco, he’s now based in Portland Oregon, and loves snowboarding, running, and coffee.