Founders get too much credit: A thank you note to the team behind Paribus
First, a note: Karim and I write this only as ourselves. This is not on behalf of any organization.
Second, we are thrilled to share the news that Paribus is joining forces with Capital One. If you’d like to see the story, please see: the announcement, or the story on TechCrunch.
Now that we have the formalities out of the way — I want to be clear. Paribus would not have become what it is today without the support, investment and talent of many key people along the journey.
In some past coverage, Karim and I have gotten too much credit. Like many first-time founders, we had a good idea, worked very hard (living out our first year on the savings we pulled together from working our last jobs), and navigated tricky situations (try starting a company when you’re on a visa from Lebanon). We built a very basic version of something people wanted.
This post is about the people that turned Paribus the idea, into Paribus the company. These are the engineers who wrote the algorithms that saved our users millions of dollars. These are the people who took a chance and invested in us. These are the people who spread our work and turned it into something much larger. They are building the future, and we’ve been lucky to be part of it. They changed my life, and together transformed the lives of many others.
To the Paribus team, thank you.
Philippe Tyan has been supporting us since 2014. He brought our visual identity, logo and functional designs into life. I am sure that he will be a force in the design community for years to come.
Nick Greenfield is our COO, and was transformative in understanding and multiplying the growth trajectory of the company. Any company working to uncover what leads to healthy, scalable growth and efficient operations would be lucky to work with him.
Karen Castelletti is a driving force behind our backend engineering operations. The codebase that she refined made it possible for Paribus to scalably communicate on behalf of hundreds of thousands of users (without human interaction). She brings unbelievable leverage to everything we do.
Marc Atiyeh is our Head of Growth. Not only was he the first employee to join, but the insights that he brought from his prior work on Yahoo’s ad team, and his continued focus on learning, were foundational to our growth story. Marc’s unique ability to dig into data was instrumental in powering our growth.
Gene Lee is one of the hardest working developers I have ever met. Fully self taught, he designed and implemented the Paribus that users see and interact with. His work has made the front-end and email flow of our product visually striking, functional, and easy to interact with.
Will Locke is the head of our mobile and mobile apps. From the ground up, he rebuilt what was a good iOS app into a visually stunning app (See: Paribus 2.0 for iOS). He is currently building a cutting-edge technology that I believe will multiply how much we can save our users (stay tuned).
Jason Katzer is a wildly talented Python developer and engineering leader. His code is clean, lucidly brilliant and like Karen, Jason has created a foundation for far more precision in our back-end processes and scalability in our codebase. And he brings an unmatched lightheartedness to the office that keeps all of us smiling everyday.
Mike Fiedler is our Head of Engineering operations. He has already multiplied the efficiency of our infrastructure many times over (saving Paribus a scary amount of funds), and is transforming our codebase into one that our engineering team can work with much more efficiently.
Elijah Feldman runs special operations and many of our customer support efforts. Among his many contributions, he spearheaded the creation of the self-help center (this made our support operations much more efficient)
Jona Siemsen has been with us since the early days on customer support, putting in hours and outlasting when no one else could.
Anthony “Tony” Rios is a key contributor on customer support and happiness. He leads our social media presence and is a driving force behind our the work we do to put our users first.
And to our interns, Andrew M. Malek, Ricky Moezinia, Veeral Patel, Ori Goldfield, Kat Tchebotareva, Eric Hu, and Tony Huang, thank you.
Thank you Zach Frankel for your partnership, friendship and guidance. You made all the difference for us in our best and toughest moments.
I look forward to building what lies ahead with you.
To Obytes, a great partner to Paribus, thank you.
Mo Mughrabi and the team at Obytes are incredible developers. They will always be our trusted friends. For many of our technical and product efforts, the support, dedication and raw talent that Mo, Elmehdi, Moussa, Ahmed, Adil and others at Obytes took Paribus to the next level. We have loved working with Obytes, and consider anyone else who has the opportunity to work with Obytes very lucky.
To our advisors and investors, thank you.
We are deeply grateful to our investors, partners and advisors who believed in us. We would never have gotten off the ground without their support and guidance. Specifically:
Niko Bonatsos and Joel Cutler of General Catalyst, thank you. Your insights in building great consumer products within retail and adjacent spaces have made all the difference to us. It has been a privilege to be able to work with you.
Vishal Garg, Nicholas Calamari, Lauren Bonner, Andrew Unger and the partnership of 1/0 Capital, thank you. You backed us and supported us before there was much to back at all, and created the right environment for us to develop and thrive in New York City.
Thank you to Christian Lawless of Conversion Capital. The insights that you shared with us on the direction of the financial services industry and financial technology were transformative.
Thank you to Josh Elman at Greylock Partners. You are one of the best product minds we have ever worked with. Your targeted advice took our product to the next level.
To anamitra banerji at Afore Capital and jonathan ehrlich of Foundation Capital, thank you. You discovered us in the early days, and were a constant support.
Thank you Aneel Ranadive of Soma Capital — having your help this summer meant a great deal to us (and thanks for introducing what we’re doing to Shaq)!
Thank you Kevin Colleran and the partnership at Slow Capital for your help connecting us with many in the technology and media communities.
And to the partners and our S15 family at Y Combinator, thank you. Specifically, thank you Justin Kan, Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, Qasar Younis, Kirsty Nathoo, Kat Mañalac, and many others. The three months we spent together taught us lessons that have transformed Karim and me as entrepreneurs.
Thank you Hank Handelsman and Thomas Toepke. Without your guidance on many issues, we would never have made it through. Thank you for always being a true friend.
And to our advisors, thank you. Thank you Don Kingsborough, for your insight and partnership in working with the retail ecosystem. I cannot wait to see what you build as President of Westfield’s Retail Solutions group. Thank you Jacob Goldfield for your insightful and advice at many high pressure moments in our journey. Thank you Daniel Goldberg for setting our legal foundation from before day one, and helping us navigate issues in IP creation. Thank you to Geoffrey Woo for the friendly competition at Nootrobox, and the pressure that pushed us from good to great. Thank you Jennifer Xia for being our earliest investor/advisor and being a part of founding the company. Thank you Mick Johnson for teaching us what it means to build an engineering culture. Thank you to Zaid Al-Rifai and Christian Chauvet for your friendship and support. Thank you to mom (x2), dad (x2) and brothers (x3) and family (xn). And thank you to Stephanie and Kim for always being there for us.
To those who supported us, thank you.
Thank you Gunderson Dettmer for helping us navigate our legal efforts. Our appreciation goes out to David Young, Scott Exner, Randall Clark, Laura Hansell, Aaron Rubin, Emily Lieberman, Lisa Gorrin, Caitlin Johnston and the full team. Thank you to Peter Roberts and David Harrison of Roberts Immigration, Angela Guan, Jeff Patt, Barry Schaevitz, Mark McCreary, Rachel Mynhier, and Leonard Patel for all your support with immigration, IP and law. To Lewis Drummond, Mercer Cook, Robin Haack, Nate Luman, Keith Greenbaum, Matt Keyser, Cyril Aris, Mounia Akl, Collier Simon, and Ashok Rao, thank you for all you’ve done to help us build our brand, community and technical platform. Thank you to the team at Return Path, especially Dan Corbin, Michael Bernstein, Eric Pinzur, Tony Blank, Desiree Schillinger, and Sarabjit Singh. Thank you to Jake Honig, Trip Adler, Jake Gibson, Peter Boyce, Spencer Lazar, Vishal Mahtani, Johnny Motley, Gus Rojo, Dakota Gruener, Povio, Nicholas Bates, SVB, and the family at 250N10! Thank you to Ryan Sandler, Brad Rose, Paxton Maeder-York and Daniel Taboada. Thank you to Max Kolysh, Ben Yu, J.J. Fliegelman, and Omar Bohsali for your early and continued support.
Thank you to those who first told and have shared our story, especially Sam O'Keefe for taking a chance and introducing Paribus to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt’s startup battlefield, the Product Hunt community, Michael Cappetta, Olivia Sterns, Sarah Perez, Eric Newcomer, Kristen Wong, J Money, Casey Newton, Jillian D’Onfro, Colleen Taylor, Zach Epstein, Joanie Demer, Wagatwe Wanjuki, Erin Barry, Alicia Syrett, Amanda Drury, David Wu, Nat Burgess, Heather Schnepf, Molly Blake, Harry Stebbings, Jeremy Davis, Chris Chmura, Tricia Kean, Farnoosh Torabi, Albert Dutra, Harlan Quinn, Rebecca Jarvis, Jon Steinberg, Ashley Vaughan, Rafe Needleman, Joanna Chow, Jerome Colombain, Alex Konrad, and so many more.
Thank you to our earliest users, friends and family members who helped us tinker with, refine and improve Paribus even before day one. There are many others who made an enormous difference that I may have left off by error or accidental omission — thank you for making this possible. I will do my best to fix.
And thank you to the team at Capital One. This is an incredible company, a place where customers will be honored and we could not be more excited to be joining you.
Eric and Karim
