Stephen Baker once named Paul Atreides—the reluctant strategist turned empire builder from Dune—as his fictional alter ego. It’s a telling choice. As President and CEO of ActiveState, Baker is steering a more than twenty-year-old company into new territory: the fight to secure open source software at the supply chain level.
After three years leading generative AI and machine learning go-to-market at AWS, Baker had no shortage of options. But it wasn’t big tech that drew him to ActiveState. It was the opportunity to retool a trusted platform for a risk landscape that’s only grown more urgent. ActiveState had already earned a quiet but massive footprint: 97% of the Fortune 1000 use its technology. Now, Baker is expanding its scope to meet the full complexity of today’s software supply chains.
Baker is no stranger to transformation. His background spans speech recognition, cognitive search, and early AI applications, with five startup exits and a long track record of leading companies from zero to scale. From Attivio to StackState and then Amazon, he’s consistently gravitated toward complexity: markets where the problems are evolving faster than the products.
“Somewhere between 85% and 90% of companies globally are using open source,” he said in a recent interview. His plan: take ActiveState from package provider to a platform that supports secure open source integration across the entire development pipeline. That includes universal observability into open source usage, automated policy enforcement, secure environment management, and support for systems that have reached end-of-life.
At ActiveState, Baker’s self-described superpower—“seeing around corners”—speaks to his focus on staying ahead of customer needs before they turn into problems. Open source may be free, but in today’s environment, the cost of getting it wrong is high. Baker’s bet is that the next wave of innovation will come from managing open source more safely.
