Why I Joined Bowery
If there was anything my time at Rough Draft Ventures taught me, it’s that the most important factor of a successful company sine qua non is a great team. There are obviously many factors that feed into team dynamics—What’s your work ethic? What’s the division of responsibility? How honest are you with your co-founders?—but if the mixture of those ingredients is just right, an intelligent, charismatic, and resilient founding team is hard to beat.
Well before I began casting a wide net for early-stage startup opportunities this past semester, I met David Byrd at a small restaurant in San Francisco. Over an hour or two, we talked about our mutual experience interning at Medium and Jawbone. His bluntly honest thoughts and formidable work experience piqued my interest, and over the next few weeks we met for tea several more times. When he described what he’d be working on after Medium—a way to make web development more simple and seamless, and a solution to the problems he had encountered leading development at Shoptiques, Bloglovin, and Medium—I was interested, but I wanted to explore other options as well.
When I came back to New York City at the end of the summer, the first person I met for dinner was Steve Kaliski, David’s good friend and cofounder. Steve is the most well-adjusted math whiz I know, and is just as thoughtful as David. While in school, I met with 10-15 other early stage startups, some venture-funded, others just a couple people in an apartment. But when David and Steve asked me on a Thursday to come down to New York for the weekend to help them finish the Bowery website for an initial launch, I didn’t hesitate to make the 8-hour round trip. And for the 48 hours I worked with them, it was clear we’d make a compelling team.
Needless to say, I’ve joined Bowery full time as design and business cofounder to help move the needle on the state of web development.
So what is Bowery? It’s a command line tool that makes setting up and managing your local development environment dead simple. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be pushing out a revamped site that explains more of the features and lets you try it out for yourself. We’re working out of eBay’s offices in NYC as part of the Friends of eBay program—stop by if you’re around.
Bowery has the potential to transform how companies develop software and is one of the most exciting enterprise startups in New York City. The problem we’re solving is one I experienced firsthand at Jawbone this summer—the companies that do the most compelling work have complicated web stacks that can take days to properly configure. Changing the way code is written and tested without changing developers’ workflow is one of the most exciting ideas I’ve seen in enterprise software in a long time.
I can’t wait to reveal what’s behind the curtain soon.
