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It is with great sadness that we share the loss of one of our own. Cody Smith, Camus co-founder and CTO, passed away last week. Cody was a giant in his field, a community leader, and a beloved friend. Through his work with Camus and his leadership of the arts nonprofit Looking Up and arts space Upside, he worked tirelessly to bring light to the world.
At Google, Cody was one of the early members of the industry-shaping Site Reliability Engineering team, technical lead for reliability for Google Search, and went on to author and lead multiple industry-impacting projects. He led Google’s internal RPC security rollout, co-authored Google’s network load balancer, and acted as architectural lead for the 2,000-person Site Reliability team. As CTO at Camus, Cody harnessed his experience with complex, large-scale systems to bring high performance, high reliability computing to the challenge of how we understand and manage the grid.
When we started Camus, our first office was in Cody’s garage workshop near his home in the San Francisco Mission District. The garage was also home to a community maker space, Upside, and to Looking Up, two arts-focused nonprofits which Cody co-founded in 2018. Upside provides co-working space for local artists and a small startup. Looking Up produces large-scale monumental art that can be seen in local venues, from city parks to Burning Man, and that travels around the world to installation locations globally. This was an incredible first home for Camus: small in square footage, huge in community and heart.
As Camus grew, we thought a lot about what kind of company we wanted to build: what problems we wanted to solve, who we wanted to help, and what kind of impact we wanted to have. Cody was at the heart of that. His strong sense of community and people-driven values are reflected in our company values:
Cody was an appreciator of superpowers. He had plenty of them himself: generous, empathetic, ferociously smart, consistently humble. He could solve a Rubik’s cube in under 30 seconds and he treated every single person he met like they mattered. When he interviewed team members, he often did the culture interview, and more than one current Camus team member remembers being surprised to find that the CTO most wanted to hear about what they valued and how they wanted to impact the world around them. He valued what was special in people, and he valued them not in spite of their differences but because of them.
Of all the values on the list, though, Cody most embodied Be Good Energy. We are blessed with a wonderful team at Camus, but even among us, Cody was a standout. He did not begin this work as an expert in energy or the distribution grid, but he became one. He achieved it by listening, by bringing relentless curiosity and drive, and by showing up every day excited for the mission we were building toward and the work we were doing. It’s easy to set big goals, but the everyday work is what makes them happen. Every day, Cody showed up excited to do the work, and he energized the people around him to do that too.
When you lose someone, you sometimes struggle to understand how to move forward. We don’t have that confusion. We know exactly what to do. Cody showed us every day: we show up, we focus on the work, and we focus on the mission. He cared very deeply about climate change, the energy transition, and the tremendous responsibility that comes from being in positions of power. He was a tireless advocate for focusing on the real-world impacts of our work, including climate goals, but also including equity and affordability. He cared about how his work, and by extension Camus’ work and that of our customers, impacts the communities we serve, and he reminded us that it is our responsibility to make sure the outcomes are good.
There is nothing that Cody would have wanted more than for us to continue his work. We are richer for having known him, and heartbroken that he will not be able to continue the journey with us. He is still with us in our hearts, and we will keep working every day to build the future we all want to live in.
