I make a lot of mistakes so others don't have to.

"A poet and a programmer — he thinks through all aspects of turning a concept into a company."

Maurice Boissiere, Partner, DataTribe

I run V1 Worldwide, where I design, code, and ship products myself. Right now that's three developer tools: Intraview for AI code review walkthroughs, Unfudged for filesystem flight recording, and Sandman for zero-blue night filtering. I wrote more about where all of this is headed.

"He has an innate sense of where people will be most empowered and puts them in those roles with trust and confidence."

Zack Davis, Head of Product, Rollbar

At Rollbar, the company was two quarters from insolvency. We cut cloud costs 70%, rebuilt the error pipeline from 54% P90 at 2 minutes to 99% P99 at 10 seconds, and I took L1 on-call for the entire engineering team. At Saturn, the CTO left and monthly burn was $150K. We cut it to $60K and shipped the first iOS release in a year within six weeks. Snap acquired them. At Collective Hub, I was the sole on-call for the AI Categorization Assistant and ran company-wide customer support solo during peak tax season. Most people romanticize this kind of work, but it's mostly just showing up.

"A very unique intersection of skills in product, engineering and management. A true unicorn and an incredible communicator."

Jameson Detweiler, Fellow, South Park Commons

Gigster went from 3 people to 37 and $60K to $1.9M revenue in nine months. We expanded the developer network from a dozen contractors to over 1,000. At AddThis, I was the first engineer. We built real-time analytics processing a billion events a month before "big data" was a phrase. I designed the ad products, including search retargeting and a video ad model with 80%+ margins. Oracle acquired them. I think entrepreneurship is a skill you get better at by doing it repeatedly, not by reading about it.

"He is concerned with the people, first. Cy has vision and capacity for understanding user behavior, which resulted in a well-thought backlog that could outlast many iterations of development."

Amy Kopischke, Director of Product Management, Merrick Bank

SPINE was a Google Sheets add-on I took from concept to marketplace through V1, then shut it down when the co-founder relationship wasn't working. ThinkingTime was a Slack app that gave teams time to think before responding: everyone answers independently, then all responses are revealed at once. Kapuno was a community platform where people shared ideas and got feedback from niche interest groups. These days I'm building for myself first and seeing what sticks.

"A charismatic leader who finds a way to bring out the best in his team."

Ilya Masalov, Head of Mobile, Knowledge Genesis Group

I take on-call. Every company I've joined, I've put myself on the rotation before asking anyone else to. Customer support, incident response, whatever nobody wants to do, I do it first. I hire for judgment over credentials and get out of the way once people have what they need. If your team is apologizing for doctor appointments, you have a culture problem, not a performance problem.