Ed Goode

Ed Goode is co-founder and CEO of Shadeform, a unified GPU cloud platform based in Charlotte, North Carolina. He started the company in 2023 with Ronald Ding after working on ML infrastructure and compute orchestration at Microsoft Azure, and he frames Shadeform as a single control plane for GPU capacity across many clouds.

From Azure orchestration to multi-cloud GPUs

His career started at Microsoft, where he worked on ML infrastructure and compute orchestration for Azure. In a Cerebral Valley interview, he said he began obsessing about the problem in 2021 and 2022, when reliance on a few hyperscalers looked like a risk for downtime, pricing, and access. “I always felt that the first generation of cloud was built wrong,” he said. “Each cloud is essentially built on top of their virtualization layer, so we started Shadeform after working on virtual machines scale sets to build a multi-cloud, distributed VM layer that we could then build ML services on top.”

Building a single control plane

Shadeform joined Y Combinator in Summer 2023. Goode’s public pitch is a unified console and API so teams can see availability and pricing, then provision GPU instances without standing up a new account on every provider. In a DigitalOcean customer story he put the long-term goal plainly: “We’ve been building this company for the past two years, and ultimately we’re working towards a fully managed cloud-like experience, but built on top of a distributed compute layer.”

He has also said the company wants to manage GPU-enabled servers widely and let the strongest clouds rise on transparent price and quality. Read our review of Shadeform for how the product scores for buyers.