Abby Kearns

• Favorite part of my job: Getting to work with amazing people and customers, tackling hard problems together, and occasionally having that moment where something complex suddenly clicks.
• I got hooked on tech: In high school when I realized you could write a few lines of code and suddenly make a computer do something entirely new. That idea—that you could build things out of pure logic—was pretty irresistible.
• I love to also: Travel, seek out great food wherever I am, and always have at least one good book going.
• Leaders who inspire me: Margaret Hamilton — for her pioneering work in software engineering and the rigor she brought to building systems that had to work the first time.
• Fictional Alter Ego: Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek—calm under pressure, science-driven, and willing to make tough calls when it matters.
• Superpower: Connecting dots—between ideas, technology, and people—to turn complex problems into something solvable.

Abby Kearns is CEO of ActiveState and a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building and scaling enterprise software organizations. She previously served as CTO of Puppet, where she helped lead a strategic transformation culminating in the company’s acquisition by Perforce Software. Earlier in her career, she was CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, guiding the growth of one of the industry’s largest open source cloud platform ecosystems. Abby currently serves on the board of Akka (formerly Lightbend). She is known for helping companies translate major shifts in cloud, open source, and AI into clear product strategy and enterprise growth.