Selling "Chaos" to the Fortune 100 Almost Killed His Company (Kolton Andrus)

We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories · Jul 23, 2026 · 45m

His pitch — "let us break your systems on purpose" — thrilled engineers and terrified the Fortune 100 executives who signed the checks. So Kolton Andrus did something few founders have the nerve to do: he stopped using the very term his company was built on.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Kolton Andrus, founder, chairman, and CEO of Gremlin — the company that carried chaos engineering out of Amazon and Netflix and into the Fortune 100, then repositioned it as reliability engineering to win the enterprise. Kolton shares how a brand-new…