Lew Cirne

Lew Cirne
Name	Lew Cirne
Birth date	1965
Birth place	Canada
Occupation	Entrepreneur, software engineer, investor
Known for	New Relic
Alma mater	Queen's University, University of New Brunswick, Harvard University

Lew Cirne is a Canadian-American entrepreneur and software engineer best known as the founder and former CEO of New Relic. He is recognized for pioneering application performance management and observability platforms used by technology companies, financial institutions, media organizations, and government agencies. Cirne's career spans roles in software development, startup leadership, venture investing, and public speaking at industry conferences.

Early life and education

Born in Canada, Cirne attended Queen's University and the University of New Brunswick, where he studied engineering and computer science alongside contemporaries at institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Toronto. He later pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, interacting with researchers and faculty associated with MIT Media Lab, Harvard Business School, Princeton University, Yale University, and Columbia University. During his academic years he engaged with projects echoing work from organizations like Bell Labs, IBM Research, AT&T, Microsoft Research, and Sun Microsystems.

Career

Cirne began his professional career as a software engineer and architect with firms in Silicon Valley and the northeastern technology corridor, overlapping ecosystems that included Apple Inc., Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Oracle Corporation. He held engineering and product roles that connected to platforms from VMware, Red Hat, SAP SE, Cisco Systems, and Intel Corporation. His early work addressed performance profiling and diagnostics, drawing on methodologies paralleling contributions from Grady Booch, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, Guido van Rossum, and Linus Torvalds. Cirne's industry network encompassed executives and technologists from Adobe Systems, Salesforce, Twitter, Netflix, and LinkedIn.

Founding and leadership of New Relic

In 2008 Cirne founded New Relic, an observability and application performance monitoring company that served clients including Netflix, Airbnb, Dropbox, Spotify, and Uber Technologies. Under his leadership as CEO, New Relic pursued product development informed by research from Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Elastic NV, and Prometheus (software), integrating telemetry and analytics approaches that paralleled work from Splunk, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, PagerDuty, and Datadog. Cirne guided New Relic through venture financing rounds involving investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark (venture capital), Accel Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners. He led the company to a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange and navigated corporate governance interactions with boards and regulators including Securities and Exchange Commission, NASDAQ, and institutional shareholders like BlackRock and Vanguard Group.

Other ventures and investments

Beyond New Relic, Cirne has engaged in angel investing and venture activity with startups in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and data analytics, participating in funding alongside firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and First Round Capital. His investment portfolio and advisory roles have connected him to companies like Databricks, Confluent, Snowflake, HashiCorp, and Cockroach Labs. Cirne has also served as an advisor or board member paralleling governance at organizations including Y Combinator, Techstars, SV angel, 500 Startups, and Plug and Play Tech Center.

Awards, recognition, and public speaking

Cirne has been recognized by industry media and business publications alongside leaders featured in outlets like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Fortune (magazine). He has delivered keynote presentations and participated in panels at conferences such as AWS re:Invent, Google Cloud Next, Microsoft Ignite, Strata Data Conference, O'Reilly Velocity Conference, Gartner Symposium, TC Disrupt, and Web Summit. His work in observability and entrepreneurship has been cited in reports from Gartner, Forrester Research, IDC, McKinsey & Company, and BCG (Boston Consulting Group).

Personal life and philanthropy

Cirne resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and engages with philanthropic and civic initiatives alongside institutions such as Stanford University, Harvard University, UC Berkeley Foundation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Nature Conservancy. His charitable interests include supporting STEM education, research in computer science, and public health projects connected to organizations like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Khan Academy, and Code.org. Cirne's personal network extends to technology leaders and entrepreneurs associated with Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk.

Category:Canadian businesspeople Category:Technology company founders Category:Living people