From DeepBench’s First Engineering Hire to CTO
I am now the CTO of DeepBench. I couldn’t have anticipated rising to this position when I joined, but I couldn’t imagine a better fit for myself in the present.
In the Spring of 2018, I got to talking with Nikhil Punwaney (Co-Founder of DeepBench), a good friend of mine while in school at MIT, about the company he was trying to build with a few Sloan MBAs.
They were looking for some help building out their web app.
I was working on building a VR company at the time, but I was interested.
Coincidentally, DeepBench was headquartered right next to where I was working, so I took a walk over one day to sit down with the rest of the team.
I liked what I heard.
I mean, I REALLY liked what I heard.
They had customers, they were experiencing growth, they had experience.
They had a CTO in Derek Hans (Co-Founder of DeepBench) who could mentor me. The infrastructure they were building had good bones, and, most importantly, the business was ahead of the technology.
I had spent the prior years building some wicked (Boston folks will understand this means emphasis) cool VR systems, but I had no idea what I was going to do with them.
I was ready to build with a purpose, for an established market, toward a real vision.
When I joined DeepBench in June 2018 as the first engineering hire, there was no public-facing DeepBench web app.
There was a small internal platform that our account managers could use to keep themselves organized, but almost everything was still happening manually.
We were selling the vision of a fully autonomous system, but behind the scenes, we were still powered by extremely hard-working humans (thanks Tyler Mayo and Sophia Lin).
The mandate for the tech team was clear: automate everything you can and allow the client to do more by themselves but do not sacrifice an ounce of customer satisfaction.
Since then I’ve had my hands in everything DeepBench has built.
We released that public-facing web app BTW.
We built a system for turning client project requests into onboarded, qualified DeepBench users needing as little manpower as possible.
We improved that system 100 times over.
We integrated with other tech platforms.
We implemented functionality so other companies could use a white-labeled version of our system for their own employees.
We ripped that functionality out.
We upgraded our cloud infrastructure.
We bettered our security posture.
We created innumerable tools to improve our employee efficiency, data analysis, and product pipeline.
Now, in 2022, we have a platform that I am immensely proud of having a hand in. A platform capable of handling hundreds (and soon thousands) of active projects at any given time.
While the platform was growing over the past four years, DeepBench was evolving in so many other ways.
We brought 15 new faces on board.
I moved from Boston to Pittsburgh in the second half of 2019, becoming one of DeepBench’s first remote employees and helping to set an example of how our team could function remotely.
In March 2020, everyone (and not just DeepBench) joined me in going remote.
Some colleagues have left to pursue other opportunities. One of those people is Nikhil. The friend and founder who sparked my start at DeepBench left in December 2021 to start business school in France.
We grew quite close in our time spent grinding away at all the things it takes to grow a tech start-up, and I am going to miss him dearly.
But I am addicted to DeepBench. I’m not going anywhere.
DeepBench, on the other hand, is going places.
My intention is to continue to drive DeepBench into the future, with our technology at the head.
We aren’t as small as we used to be. More users rely on us than ever before, so stability is at a premium.
We know these things, we respect these truths.
But we aren’t going to let this stop us from shipping new products and features that delight our customers and improve our effectiveness.
I am passionate about technology and passionate about building things.
I am excited to help pilot DeepBench into a more mature and extremely promising future.
Thanks for listening and if you’re following DeepBench closely you’ll certainly hear more from me soon.
