CenturyLink Chief Innovation Officer Leaves to Pursue Writing Career

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

CenturyLink’s chief innovation officer Lucas Carlson is leaving the company this week, two years after joining the company as part of its AppFog acquisition.

Carlson founded AppFog in 2010 and sold the platform-as-a-service company to Louisiana-based CenturyLink in 2013. The startup was dissolved into CenturyLink’s hosting subsidiary Savvis.

According to a report by VentureBeat, Carlson is leaving CenturyLink to pursue his writing career. Carlson has written several books, including two books on programming and entrepreneurial non-fiction book called Finding Success in Failure: True Confessions from 10 Years of Startup Mistakes. His current book is a startup thriller novel called The Term Sheet. Carlson also runs an entrepreneurial podcast, called Craftsman Founder.

In an email to the WHIR, a CenturyLink spokesperson said: “We wish Lucas Carlson well and thank him for his leadership of CenturyLink Labs as he leaves CenturyLink to pursue other opportunities. Sekar Swaminathan, senior vice president of integration and innovation at CenturyLink, will now also oversee Lucas’ former responsibilities.”

In his time at CenturyLink, Carlson helped launch the Panamax open source tool for deploying applications in Docker containers. Panamax helped to make Docker and Linux containers available to average developers, Carlson told VentureBeat last year. Since then, the popularity of Docker has only grown.

While Carlson was certainly an advocate for Docker technology and helped CenturyLink grow in that area, it appears that the company has invested in talent in that segment beyond Carlson. Its CenturyLink Innovation Labs division continues to share its expertise and R&D on its blog.

Earlier this year, CenturyLink acquired Orchestrate, a startup that provides various NoSQL databases as a service through a single API.