Romildo Wildgrube

My story starts in Getúlio Vargas, a small town in Rio Grande do Sul — the southern Brazilian state known for its Gaúcho culture. My father, Antonio Wildgrube, was a cabinetmaker by trade; my mother, Eleonora Wildgrube, was a self-made seamstress. I'm the youngest of three — my sister Rosane is the eldest, and my brother is the middle child. My family's own roots trace back to Germany: my ancestors migrated to Brazil in 1909, part of the wave of German immigration into the state.

As a kid I was sent off to boarding school in São Leopoldo — fittingly, the very city founded by German immigrants in 1824 and considered the cradle of German culture in Brazil — then later moved to Porto Alegre. Each stop taught me a little more about independence and adapting to new places, a theme that would come to define my life.

It's a fitting bit of symmetry that the town where I boarded as a kid was itself founded by German settlers a century before my own family made that same crossing. Porto Alegre came next — the last stop in Brazil before a much bigger move.

In the 1990s, I left Brazil for Germany — a kind of homecoming for my family's own history. My life there started as an Au Pair before I landed in the beautiful city of Bonn, then the capital of a country on the verge of enormous change. I studied in Köln (Cologne), and later worked for the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, the German Federal Ministry of Health.

I was in Berlin during German reunification — a moment of history I got to witness firsthand, though I never lived there. I still keep a small piece of the Berlin Wall as a reminder of it.

Bonn gave me my start in Europe. Köln gave me an education and, later, a role inside the German federal government — a very different world from the small town I grew up in.

From Bonn, I made my way to the Bay Area, arriving in San Mateo in 1995 — my first home in the US — right as the dot-com boom was taking off. It was one of the most electric times to be in technology, and it's where my career truly took shape.

Since then, I've called several Bay Area cities home — Foster City, Santa Clara, Cupertino — before settling into San Jose, where I now live with my beloved wife, Wei-Chien, our two sons, Noah and Lucas, and our three pets: Crowley, Nola, and Chattie.

These days home is San Jose's Santana Row — the walkable, always-buzzing corner of the city where shops, restaurants, and city life are all a short stroll away. Fittingly, it's also just down the road from the Winchester Mystery House — appropriate company, given how my wife describes my own building habits.

Technology has been my passion from the start, and I've never stopped learning. Over the course of my career I've lived through the huge transitions our industry has gone through — from standalone software and physical data centers, to the rise of cloud infrastructure, and now into the age of AI. Along the way I've touched just about everything: operating systems, hardware, infrastructure, and code.

• Systems Administrator
• IT Manager
• Director
• Sr. Director
• VP
• Founder

I started out as a systems administrator and worked my way through IT Manager, Director, Sr. Director, VP, and eventually founder — going from sole contributor to leading large teams across corporate and production environments. I've helped take startups from the ground up to successful outcomes, including acquisitions and IPOs. Along the way I've attended countless conferences and courses, put in long hours trying new things, and stayed endlessly excited about what's next. I'll also admit to being a sucker for gadgets — my budget has taken a hit over the years, but they've always brought me genuine happiness and excitement about how fast this industry moves.

More than anything, I'm proud of the talented people I've worked with and the teams I've helped build.

Success isn't something you achieve alone — it comes from teams who trust you and know you have their back, in good times and bad.

What I believe matters most — more than any title or career milestone — is caring about others and leading with empathy, and having no patience for people who only think of themselves. Friends sometimes chalk it up to the German blood in me — direct about what's on my mind and about what I believe in. My philosophy is simple: I want to leave this world knowing I cared about others, rather than having been driven by greed at someone else's expense.

Travel has always been in my blood — maybe it started with all that early moving around. I've now visited more than 30 countries, and my bucket list keeps growing faster than I can check countries off it.

41

Countries visited

∞

Still on the list

When I'm not at my day job in tech, you'll usually find me building something. For years, that meant competitive squash — I was an active player for a long time. These days I'm chasing a new hobby as an amateur scuba diver, trading the squash court for the open water.

Next up: the barndominium. Ten acres in Rescue, California — a pond, mature trees, and wildlife — with my dream barndominium designed to sit right in the middle of it all. Between this and the ADU, my wife's Winchester Mystery House comparison keeps getting harder to argue with.

What sold me on this particular property were the views — from up here you can look out over Folsom Lake, with the Sacramento skyline visible in the distance.

Rescue itself has a small, quirky history. It started out as a stagecoach stop on the wagon road from Sacramento to the Gold Rush mining camps, originally known as Green Valley. In 1895, the U.S. Post Office asked the town to pick a new name since there were already too many “Green Valleys” in California — and a local miner named Andrew Hare, whose claim had literally rescued him from poverty, suggested “Rescue.” The name stuck, and the sleepy little town in the Sierra foothills has kept its rural, small-town character ever since. Read more on the history of Rescue, CA.