Robert Ross

Robert Ross founded FireHydrant in 2018 as the incident-management tool he wished he had while on call at Namely and DigitalOcean. He ran the company as CEO through Series B and an acquisition of Blameless, then into Freshworks' ServiceOps story after the 2025–2026 acquisition.

On-call pain at Namely and DigitalOcean

Company materials and his author bio say Ross founded FireHydrant because coordinating incidents at companies like Namely and DigitalOcean still meant stitching alerts, chat, status, and retros by hand. He wanted a purpose-built system for declaring incidents, running response, and learning afterward.

Building FireHydrant into an incident platform

As CEO he raised through Series B, shipped alerting and on-call under the Signals product, and later acquired Blameless to deepen enterprise incident management. His public writing argues reliability is a cultural and operational practice, not only an engineering metric, and that teams should declare lower-severity incidents so learning compounds.