Natalie Pedraza used to think DreamHost was the enemy.
We aren’t saying metaphorically. We’re talking literally. Prior to DreamHost, Pedraza ran training for the executive team at a large outsourcing firm in Colombia, one that handled support for accounts like Google. She recounted how DreamHost kept recruiting the firm’s best people out from under them, one former Google rep at a time, and Pedraza was in the room watching it happen. “That’s the company that hated DreamHost,” she remembers of her former employer.
Fast forward five years and she’s now DreamHost’s Learning and Development Specialist, and the whole thing still makes her laugh. “When I tell people, they’re like ‘Really? You went to work for the enemy?”
She Had No Tech Background. She Applied Anyway.
Pedraza’s now-husband, Diego Lombana, had already made the jump to DreamHost. When the two reconnected years later, he wouldn’t stop telling her how different the place was. Eventually he made the case that mattered most: she was working herself into the ground at her old job for half the pay. She’d hit a wall, so she went for it: “I said, what the f***? I applied and I was hired.”
She started as a Tech Support Consultant with no technical background. “I did have to struggle. That’s the reality,” she says. But within six months, her manager was already asking where she wanted to grow, and ten months later she’d moved to the People team, where she’s been building things ever since.
The Woman Behind Half of ClickUp (and a Manager Training Overhaul)
Pedraza’s fingertips are on a lot of things at DreamHost that most people never trace back to her. She helped tie an internal employee training program called “Growth Path” to the company’s competency framework for the first time, sped up how invoices get processed, built the ClickUp project management board her team runs on today, and records the Spanish-language versions of customer education videos for products like Remixer.
Her biggest project is DreamHost’s manager training program. In 2025, she and a couple of teammates took a program that used to take nearly a year to get through and rebuilt it to run in six or seven weeks. “We still cover everything,” she says. “We just do it in a short amount of time.”
Two Days of Chats, Then One Question
Pedraza instantly knew the moment DreamHost was different from any other company she worked for.
In the first few months, she covered live chats with customers for two straight days during a rough stretch, taking six or seven at once because she wanted to prove herself. Then, by day three, the strain had her in physical pain. Her manager sat her down, and instead of the “we’re all overloaded” pep talk she braced for, he asked one question: had she told anyone she was struggling?
She hadn’t.
“It was the first time I felt that I was being taken care of,” she says. That’s the feeling she wants every new DreamHoster to experience today. “It’s safe to make mistakes here,” she says. “It’s safe to say, ‘Hey, I messed up. It’s safe to not be OK.”
We’re a family,” she goes on to say. “Not always the easy kind. Sometimes you don’t like your siblings, but you understand you’re in it together, so you work towards it.”
Diamond Painting, Reality TV, and an Audiobook Running the Whole Time
Outside of work, Pedraza is a walking contradiction in the best way. She’s a certified barista who’ll still drink whatever coffee’s in front of her, and a tattoo collector who cries through every single session. She’s also a former English teacher who spent 15 years in classrooms before landing in coaching and, eventually, tech.
Pedraza says she’s a self-described planner who can sit still for hours at a stretch, diamond painting with an audiobook going in the background (currently working through the A Court of Thorns and Roses series). Reality TV is her guilty pleasure, and she’s not sorry about it. “The more drama, the more I like them,” she says of her Real Housewives habit.
She and Lombana moved from Colombia to Southern California in 2025, with five pets in tow (one dog and four cats) then added two more once they got here: a dog and a gecko, and have been slowly working their way through the area ever since: Palm Springs, Griffith Park, and the beach. Their two dogs, Rupert and Reba, come along for most of it. “We just like to explore California together,” she says. “We like to go out with the doggies and just see new things.” Disneyland is a regular stop too, usually with a friend and his wife and usually to walk the park rather than ride anything.
Animals in general are something of a reset button for her, and she says a cat or a dog, any dog, is enough to make her day. Her go-to work playlist swings from Rob Zombie and Korn to one she calls “my inside out brain,” heavy on rockabilly and big band orchestras.
One Rule: “My Freedom Stops When Yours Begins”
Pedraza credits the line to Jean-Paul Sartre, and says her mother repeated it to her often growing up: “Mi libertad termina donde empieza la de los demás.” It means, for her, she gets to feel however she feels, but never at the expense of the people around her.
“Everybody’s their own little island, with their own boundaries,” she says. “You’ve got to know when to stop.”
These days, she’s the one making sure the next round of DreamHosters gets to feel as safe as she eventually did. If her role here were a movie genre, she says it’d be sarcastic comedy, “like The Office.” And if she ever writes a memoir, the title’s already picked: She Just Did It.
Want to work with people like Natalie Pedraza? Check out our careers page and discover what else makes DreamHost’s culture so special. Next month, meet one of our Data Center Operations Administrator, a chess-master-turned-snowboarder who shares insights on the critical role of data center operations and his unique approach to work-life balance.