Leostream is helping organizations rethink how they provide secure access to desktops, workstations and applications as IT environments become more distributed and complex. The company’s vendor-neutral remote access and connection management platform gives enterprises the flexibility to choose the infrastructure, cloud platforms and display protocols that best fit their requirements, while maintaining a consistent access experience. That flexibility has made Leostream particularly well suited to high-performance environments, including media and entertainment, engineering, energy and other industries where users need secure access to demanding workloads.
In this executive Q&A, Leostream CEO Karen Gondoly shares her unconventional journey from rocket science and technology to pastry chef and ultimately CEO. She discusses the leadership lessons she brought from restaurant kitchens, how customer-driven development and vendor neutrality differentiate Leostream, and why the rapid shift to remote work became a pivotal moment for the company. She also looks at Leostream Cloud, the challenge of staying relevant as work evolves, and why successful products ultimately depend on successful people.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career, especially one that shaped your leadership approach at your current company?
One of the leadership lessons that has stayed with me actually came from my time working in high-end restaurant kitchens before joining Leostream. A chef once told the team that if you see something on the floor, don’t assume it’s someone else’s job to pick it up. Pick it up and take care of it.
That sounds simple, but I’ve carried that philosophy throughout my career. There are always things that need to get done that don’t have a clearly defined owner. The people who step in, take responsibility and make sure nothing falls through the cracks are often the ones who become invaluable to an organization. That’s advice I give people who ask me how they can advance in their careers: don’t walk past the problem because it belongs to someone else. Help solve it.
Another experience that shaped my leadership approach came later, when I attended a women-in-technology conference and heard a presentation about the importance of communication across teams. At the time, I had people who weren’t working well together, and I realized part of the problem was that they didn’t understand or appreciate what the other person did.
I started sending a weekly company recap highlighting what different teams and individuals were accomplishing. It reinforced something I still believe strongly today: people collaborate better when they understand the value their colleagues bring to the organization. That’s even more important now that so many of us work remotely.
What initially brought you to this specific career path, and how did it lead to your role in this company?
My path to becoming CEO of Leostream was definitely not a straight line. My academic background is in rocket science, I worked in technology, and then I left technology full-time to become a pastry chef. While working in restaurants, I continued doing contract technology work in areas such as QA, technical writing and user interface design.
In 2008, I answered a Craigslist ad from Leostream looking for a part-time technical writer. During the interview, they realized that my background crossed several of the areas where they needed help, including documentation, UI and product management, so instead of hiring me part-time, they offered me a full-time position. Given the economy in 2008, it seemed like a good time to hang up my pastry-chef hat and return to technology.
My first project was creating a Quick Start Guide, and that quickly led me to identify opportunities to improve the user experience. From there, I became involved in UI design, product management, QA, development and customer-facing activities. As the company evolved, I took on more responsibilities. Eventually, our CEO moved to California and asked me to become COO and run the office. As he gradually stepped away from the business, moving from COO to CEO became a natural progression.
What makes your company stand out from competitors in the market? Can you share an example that highlights this?
For Leostream, I think it comes down to two things: product and people.
On the product side, we’re vendor-neutral to the rest of the technology stack. We don’t dictate which cloud, hosting platform or display protocol a customer needs to use. That gives organizations the flexibility to change technologies and migrate infrastructure while maintaining a consistent end-user access experience.
The second differentiator is how we work with customers. We’re small enough to be extremely responsive. Our team will get on a call, dig into a problem and, when necessary, adjust our development priorities to deliver something a customer genuinely needs. We recently released an update centered on essentially one new feature because a customer needed that functionality for its deployment. We made the decision that meeting that need was important enough to adjust the broader development schedule.
That combination of architectural flexibility and personal responsiveness is difficult to replicate. Customers aren’t simply buying our technology. They’re getting a team that’s willing to understand what they’re trying to accomplish and work with them to make it happen.
Are you working on any exciting new products or projects? How do you think this innovation will positively impact your customers?
One of the projects I’m most excited about is Leostream Cloud, a simplified hosted management plane designed to make secure remote access easier to deploy and manage. We’re initially focusing on three workflows: vendor privileged access, remote help and VPN-less remote access. The idea is to provide organizations with a streamlined way to control who can access which resources without requiring them to deploy and manage the full Leostream Platform.
The timing is particularly interesting because HP has announced the end of life of HP Anyware. For smaller organizations using the hosted HP Anyware Manager, moving to a full enterprise platform could represent a significant operational change. Leostream Cloud can provide a simpler path forward. We’re also integrating additional display protocol options, including Jump Desktop.
For existing Leostream customers using HP Anyware, the goal is equally important: give them an off-ramp that doesn’t require disrupting the end-user experience. That’s a good example of how we think about innovation. It isn’t innovation for its own sake. It’s about responding to changes in the market and giving customers practical options when the technology around them changes.
What was the tipping point for your company’s recent success? Was there a change in strategy or approach that others might learn from?
COVID was unquestionably a tipping point for Leostream. Before the pandemic, one of our biggest challenges was market awareness. We knew we had strong technology, but we wanted more people to know who Leostream was. Then, almost overnight, secure remote access went from being important for particular use cases to becoming essential for organizations around the world.
Media and entertainment provides a great example. When post-production engineers and creative professionals were sent home, their high-performance workstations couldn’t simply go home with them. We already had the Leostream Gateway, but early in the pandemic our development team moved quickly to add support for PCoIP connections through the Gateway to physical workstations equipped with remote workstation cards. That enabled creative professionals to take their zero clients home and securely connect to the high-powered systems that remained in the studio.
That ability to respond quickly helped expand Leostream’s role within major broadcast environments. The broader capabilities of our remote access and connection management technology were subsequently recognized by the Television Academy with an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award.
For me, the lesson isn’t simply that remote work created an opportunity. It’s that you can’t predict the event that will suddenly change what customers need. What you can do is build a company and a technology platform flexible enough to respond when that change happens.
Can you share a significant challenge your company faced and how you overcame it? What key lesson did that experience provide?
One of our biggest challenges has been determining how Leostream continues to evolve as the workplace changes. During COVID, remote access became essential almost overnight. Today, the world is more hybrid, which raises a different question: how do you continue delivering value when users aren’t remote all the time?
We’ve responded by expanding support for different platforms and protocols and increasing our cloud orchestration capabilities. For example, we support power control and provisioning across major cloud platforms, which can help enterprises manage infrastructure more efficiently and control costs. At the same time, we’re working to broaden the perception of Leostream beyond the high-performance computing and graphics environments where we’re already well established.
One of the lessons I’ve learned is the importance of balancing responsiveness with strategy. Being highly responsive to customers is one of our strengths, but if you’re constantly reacting to the next immediate request, you don’t always stop long enough to consider where a new capability could ultimately take the product.
We’re becoming more disciplined about balancing those two things. You need to listen closely and move quickly for customers, but you also need to periodically step away from the immediate request and look at the larger direction of the product. Sometimes moving a little slower today allows you to move much faster tomorrow.
In just a few words, what differentiates your leadership role from others in the company? What impact does this have on company culture or product success?
I would describe my leadership approach as people-centered and accessible. I want people to feel appreciated, and I want them to know that if they’re struggling with something, I’m going to listen and help where I can.
I believe that creates a more open and inviting culture, but it also has a very practical connection to the business. I can’t have product success without people’s success. Great products don’t happen independently of the people designing them, developing them, supporting them, selling them and working with customers every day. Part of my job as CEO is creating an environment where those people can be successful.
Learn more at https://leostream.com/
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