I am a co-founder and CTO at a travel and expense management company in Silicon Valley with more than a decade of experience in systems architecture and software design and development. Previously, I ran my own consultancy in D.C. and worked for a company to build a social media monitoring tool that was key in the Microsoft acquisition of my employer. I also served in the Marines as both a network/systems administrator and a developer. Ask me about: * Co-founding a company as a CTO * What my military experience taught me about tech and business * The difference between building and operating effectively for mobile vs. desktop * Team building and leadership * Our open positions ;) -- EDIT: 2/6 @ 9:41pm - Thanks for all the comments and questions, I really enjoyed them. I'll be signing off for now and checking back in the morning to see if there are any other questions I can answer.
I’m a CEO as well. What did your Military experience teach you? Was it a mandatory service like in Korea or Israel? Which branch of Military were you in? Were you an officer?
This is a good question. I think there are two main themes that stay with me to this day from my military experience. The first is the ability to deal with the stress/ups and downs of trying to build a venture funded business - I have a lot of great experience to draw on that helps me normalize and process that. The second is more around leadership. I have been leading people since I was 20 years old, and I am able to use that in what I do today - although at the time, I didn't realize the importance of what I was learning. I was in the Marine Corps, and I was enlisted.
For my first employee, should I hire them as contractor or part time employee?
How hard is it to hire people?
We moved to SF in order to start this business. Hiring great people is one of the first and hardest lessons that I've had to learn from this journey. When you're a 2 person company, it's quite difficult to get someone to take a bet on you. Fortunately, we've been able to build a great team with an environment and culture to match.
Just curious, why go to the SF when you have to pay twice as much for a good engineer and they’ll likely jump for a better offer in a year or 2?
What is the story of the software? Tech stack in mvp stages into growth and at scale? Did you build the product or outsource? You didn't really give any base info about the tech side of your biz, you just shared some accomplishments and left out the TC and revenue #s
Our company was started off based on the idea that travel and expense management could be done better, and that we could change the way people think about their purchasing decisions while traveling for work. In the beginning, we launched an expense and budgeting product built as a hybrid app across web, iOS, and Android. We knew we needed to be cross platform, as we didn't think expense management could be done well without it, but we were not big enough to be able to do all of that at once. Since then we've separated our platforms, and have built teams to support each. We've used a combination of employees and contractors from all around the world, but each is dedicated and deeply embedded as a part of our team and process. Our tech stack is: * Node.js w/ TypeScript for the API * Microservices on Kubernetes in an AWS VPC as infra * Ember.js for the web frontend * Java on Android * Swift on iOS * MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, NATS
Why did you chose Ember over React? Mostly asking cause I see startups all jumping on React and Ember has been lagging behind so just curious what the rationale is.
What work led you to become a CTO?
From an early start, I knew that being a CTO was something that I wanted to do. I am a trained network and systems administrator (which helps with a fundamental understanding of architecture), a self taught programmer, and have an education around technology leadership. I chose to go that route with my Master's, because I knew that this was my path. Not to mention, I was already consulting and doing development and infrastructure - so I didn't think I'd get much value from a CS degree. After that, it was all about entrepreneurship, growth, and forging my own future.
What exactly is a travel and expense management company?
Travel and expense management companies like TravelBank assist with the day-to-day operations of a company's business travel program, and provide dedicated resources and technology for all stakeholders within an organization, including CEOs and founders, employees, and of course finance departments. These services and tools help streamline both expenses and travel management to improve efficiency for business professionals.
Continuing along bYoltj's lines: 1. Why 'Travel and expense'? 2. Considering that there are already several established players in this space, what are your key differentiators?
How do you get rid of underperforming employees?
This is a very difficult topic. I, myself, tend to take too long to make a decision regarding underperforming employees. The first stage is always identifying the issues with that employee, having a frank conversation, and trying to understand why their performance is poor. Working from there, you can usually try to work with that person to correct the issue - but it doesn't always work. We like to take a proactive approach and actually recently formalized our semi annual review cycles so employees and managers are aware of performance and can take action accordingly. We've been fortunate, partially because we are very intentional when hiring, to have a great, high performing team.
Thank you for your thoughts and perspective.
How are the tech scenes different in DC and SF?
I haven't been in the DC tech scene for quite some time, but I think that the primarily difference is in the maturity of each. There is much more venture capital in Silicon Valley, and you have unprecedented access to companies all over the spectrum that creates an environment that's hard to replicate. I don't know if we could have had the growth we've had, without being here. However, in DC - there was an air of authenticity and excitement about the growing technology scene that tends to get lost as things get bigger, and you may not know everyone as closely as you did before.
What are you thoughts on hiring full time remote workers?
I am a big proponent of this - roughly half of our team is remote today. The most important thing is finding the right kind of people - and the qualities we look for don't really have anything to do with your location. The qualities I look for are drive, communication, and technical ability. This usually means we're considering local *and* remote candidates. With the advances in technology and collaboration, I don't think that there is any real reason that you shouldn't look to leverage remote workers as a competitive advantage for your company's growth.
Earlier you mentioned that you moved your company to SF because of hiring? If you half remote people, location doesn't matter
How hard is it to find great engineers that want to work for a startup?
Similar to my earlier response, hiring great people was a hard lesson that I learned early on. It's quite difficult to get someone to take a bet on your startup in the early stages, but fortunately, we've been able to build a great team with an environment and culture to match over time.
Thanks for that question. Unfortunately, I am not comfortable sharing this, due to the fact that I'll be pretty easy to identify. That being said, I would say that I'm fairly compensated for what I do and where I do it. I've been working in technology for about 15 years.