CrowdRiff’s CTO draws on personal experience to support and nurture talent
From a young age Abhi Ajgaonkar has had the tools, time, and space to teach himself about technology and innovation. Now, as the CTO of CrowdRiff — the company he co-founded in 2011 with his university classmate Dan Holowack — he’s building out a team of like minded self starters who are equally passionate about technology’s potential.
Abhi’s passion for programming began when he was growing up in India, when his father handed him a thick textbook on HTML4 at the age of ten, along with access to a computer. Before long Abhi taught himself to code, learned how the operating system worked and installed new hard drives, as well as a CD burner. Then the computer was connected to the Internet.
“That connectivity opened up what you could do,” he says. “That was what nurtured my interest in programming.”
Abhi’s passion for software engineering only intensified after he moved to Canada in 2004, attended the University of Waterloo and completed an internship at Amazon Web Services. Shortly after returning from the internship in Seattle, Abhi’s friend and classmate Dan Holowack reached out and pitched him on a Twitter analytics company he had started in his parent’s basement. The two continued to tinker with the product while consulting on the side to pay the bills.
“We pivoted five or six times in search of product-market fit,” explains Abhi. “We love building products and that’s what kept us going.”
Eventually Abhi and Dan found that fit when they developed a user generated content marketing platform to help the travel and tourism industry utilize social media content to market destinations.
Today Abhi recognizes the privileged position he was in, first when he was given a book on HTML4 and a computer to experiment with as a child, and later when he and Dan had enough runway from consulting to keep iterating on their ideas. Now, as CrowdRiff surpasses 100 employees, Abhi says he’s looking to provide the same level of support, time and resources to a growing team of engineers with a wide array of backgrounds and a passion for personal development.
“Learning has been a constant theme throughout the hiring process, from when we were a team of five and now that we’re 100 strong,” he says. “We’re always looking for someone who has a demonstrated track record of learning and has not stopped; it doesn’t matter where they are in their career.”
Abhi explains that a track record of learning is far more important than traditional resume points, adding that he’s proud to employ an extremely diverse engineering team with a wide array of cultural, geographical, educational and experiential backgrounds. Thanks to CrowdRiff’s culture of mentorship and training the company has the luxury of hiring passionate learners, whether or not they have a strong educational background in tech. For example, the team has people who came from a JavaScript background and switched to TypeScript and Go while on the job, a backend developer who now works on the SRE team learning infrastructure management with Kubernetes & Terraform, and front end developers that are training to become more full stack. In fact, one employee working in an unrelated department became a developer after a period of intense self-study that resulted in his passing a technical challenge, despite having no previous technical experience.
CrowdRiff’s success as a company and employer is largely due to its commitment to providing team members with all the tools and resources they need to be successful, no matter their background.
“Often, software teams operate by throwing more bodies at a problem if things are behind schedule. This doesn’t actually make the project move faster. If you have the budget to hire 30 engineers, hire 10 great ones and give them the budget and freedom to use tools or managed services rather than building everything in-house. so they can focus on solving your business problems” says Abhi. “Empowering them with the ability to leverage managed services so they can try a new approach and try things faster is actually preferable; I’m not sure you’d find that at many other companies.”
For example, when Google launched its Vision API that allows you to scan for objects in an image, the team had a strong instinct that customers would find it useful, so they signed up for the API’s beta program and managed to deliver value to a select group of customers quickly. As the value proposition started resonating with more prospects and customers, the team had to build out a homegrown tensorflow model (based on the original Google Vision API model) in order to scale the feature out to make it generally available at a reasonable cost.
Such an approach enables a growing team of talented engineers to tackle unique problems and arrive at creative solutions. For example, CrowdRiff is currently building machine learning models for object detection to automatically add keywords to videos, numerically score videos based on aesthetic quality to remove spam, and adding face detection to photos and videos.
From his very first interaction with computer technology, Abhi has witnessed the innovation that can occur when people are given all the tools they need to accomplish a given task. Now, he’s got a whole team of learners and builders behind him, from a wide array of backgrounds, whom he can support by drawing on his own experiences.
“People are really open to change, especially if the change means an improvement in the way they work day to day,” he says. “There’s a lot of focus on continuous improvement, and there’s a lot of focus on using technology to give us an edge to move quicker.”
