In the coming decades, there’s only going to be more software to build, operate, and scale for platforms we’re only just inventing, with code running on nearly everything we interact with day to day.
To help advance the current frontier into AI, which is built on massively distributed computing, understanding the engineering and technology stack from end to end has never been as important as today.
I’ve always had a deep interest in understanding how businesses and technology work at the foundational level. That’s why I joined the team at Hygraph when they were 5 people building out of a small office. I took the opportunity to learn the software engineering stack for massively multi-tenant B2B SaaS products. I helped build globally-distributed and highly-available cloud infrastructure, and I got to understand what it takes to scale an engineering organization from Pre-Seed through Series B, taking care of hiring and onboarding processes, documentation, and developer experience among other areas.
At TUM, I got insights into computer science and business fundamentals, getting into operating systems and computer architecture, distributed systems and heterogeneous computing with FPGAs, as well as corporate finance, business law, and operations research. I found it invaluable to discover areas that I wouldn’t have explored on my own.
After completing my studies and having built a couple of side projects over the years, I ramped up efforts in starting my own company together with my long-time friend, Tim. We believed the timing was spot on, and we wanted to solve problems we experienced ourselves in past jobs. First, we attempted to validate Anzu, which provided essential building blocks for engineering teams wanting to move fast, followed up by CodeTrail for providing better onboarding documentation.
We grew and got better every iteration, especially in sales and marketing. We crafted well-designed products, created strongly-personalized sales sequences, and ran cold-calling sessions to get our first customers.
Unfortunately, the cards were stacked against us. We failed to identify and validate an urgent, unmet business need. We didn’t have the network to collaborate with pilot customers before writing a line of code. And we didn’t have the capital for continued exploration into other ideas.
So we quit.
After a long and candid discussion with Tim, we decided it made sense for us to go back to square one and grow both our skills and network, our credentials, and financial independence with the eventual goal of getting back to building a business. The next time we work together as founders, however, we’ll solve a real problem with real customers and the capital to sustain the grind until we reach exit velocity.
Thus, I accelerated the pace of interviewing and talking to different teams in March, seeing where I could best bring in my experience and have an outsized impact and growth opportunities. Through this process, I learned a ton already, but that’s for another time.
Today, I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Inngest as a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer starting next Monday.
In the past, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit on decoupling critical services, managing distributed queues, handling failing jobs gracefully, and wrapping my head around distributed transactions. Inngest makes it ridiculously easy to build durable functions and background jobs, without managing any of the infrastructure. It’s almost magical.
Earlier this year, the team raised $6.1M in new funding by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), with follow-on investment from existing investors: GGV, Afore Capital and Guillermo Rauch. I’m joining Inngest to help scale the backend infrastructure for the next growth stage and beyond.
Over the past weeks, I’ve had an exceptionally great interview process and incredible support from Tony and the entire team at Inngest on all process-related questions. I’m absolutely thrilled to get to know everyone on the team over the coming weeks and dive into the engineering process once again.
I’ll keep you posted 👋
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who gave their advice and recommendations over the course of this long-winding process and throughout the lows and highs, this wouldn’t have been possible without you.