Post about The Team @ Emmerge
In the the last couple of months we’ve made some awesome hires and an update to this post has been long overdue.
Mark Lanett Sr. Engineer The third, and perhaps noblest, Mark on our small team is another connection from Context Optional, bringing our total up to five. We’ve gone from a bunch of old friends to a full on “Let’s get the band back together” reunion tour. As always, it’s a great feeling to have someone in the room who you’ve known for years and trust totally. We originally brought Mark on board to lead our machine learning efforts, but he’s gotten involved in everything from proper message threading to file previews. He’s already great now, but he’ll be amazing when we get to real scale, which his specialty. Like everyone on our team, Mark was hired for his brains, but he’s also a biker, skier and swing dancer. So he’s sort of a San Francisco triple threat (coding, dancing, skiing??).
Ashlee Charette Designer We had a long and winding road to finding the perfect designer for Emmerge, which was detailed in a previous post. So we ended up importing one from Canada. And what a Canadian! She previously did design for Roots Canada who specialize in adding maple leafs to everyday clothing. Unlike the rest of the team, she was someone we haven’t know for years so I can’t share a heartfelt anecdote about our past. However, her half-done layout sketches are already dramatically better than anything we’ve had so far design-wise. We hired her based on a killer portfolio and some good ideas, but she seems to be a pretty great person as well, which is cool. And she was brave enough to let us choose any photo from her Facebook account for this blog post.
Our next hire is coming very very soon, en route from France to San Francisco via New Jersey, but that’s a story for another post.
— Updated April 26, 2015 —
Last week I wrote about Why we’re building Emmerge. This is the Who. It’s just a real honour to come to work with a team like this every day and I wanted to share who we are with the world. And, if we seem like a good bunch of people to work with, send me a message: marc [at] emmerge.com — we’re hiring engineers and a design director right now and we’ll be doing plenty more hiring in the future. The cast, in order of appearance:
Jeremy Dunn Chief Technology Officer Since we met at Context Optional, Jeremy has been one of my closest friends and we’ve done all sorts of crazy things together. We’ve done a lot of camping and more than our fair share of trips to Burning Man together too, which means watching Jeremy build shelter in the desert and the woods and fix things with MacGyver-like skill. It’s amazing how he just seems to figure out the right way to do anything, and that’s what we need him for. We’re going up against applications built by Google and Microsoft and Apple and making something that competes with them is like building a shelter in a dust storm with nothing but duct tape, pliers and a ball of twine. But somehow harder. Jeremy’s a problem-solver, he’s creative and clever. He builds things, and he builds them well, maybe it’s because his dad was a carpenter? A couple months ago Jeremy became a dad too and now he’s building for the whole family.
Jeff Feldman Chief Strategy Officer It’s been more than six years since I first started at Context Optional, but it seems like a lifetime. In those days I was the creative lead at the company and came from a purely product background at Mobileplay, so Jeff had to train me in the world of the enterprise. From the motivations of buyers to the importance of the org chart. Since then we’ve worked together help a startup navigate a complex competitive landscape, created social media strategies for dozens of huge brands, and been acquired twice. We worked side by side even when he moved to Kazakhstan to support his wife Risa’s career, we worked side by side when I was sent to London to open our UK office and Emmerge feels like starting a company with my brother. Jeff is crazy smart, he’s got high standards and he keeps the rest of us honest. He’s got his eye on the long run and an eye for detail and it’s pretty great having him around.
Mark Wheeler Senior Architect I met Mark when he was falling in love with Beckie Wood, one of my dearest friends and a mentor of mine when I first started in tech (a story for another blog post). It was years before I even realized that he was a developer because we were all so blown away by how much better he was than the guy he replaced. It turns out he’s not just a great person, but he also holds a degree in computer science and physics from Amherst. He’s an avid biker, despite a life-threatening accident years ago, and he was crazy enough to work for us for months without pay. Like Jeremy he’s someone I see outside the office all the time and it’s just a great feeling to walk into the office and see him there. Mark works on the features side of the business and his fingerprints and ideas are all over our front-end. If you have any feature requests feel free to call him and make your case (Just kidding — you can reach us @Emmerge — Tweet us anytime!)
Colin McCloskey Senior Engineer Colin was yet another early employee at Context Optional (thanks Kevin and Scott!). We shared more than a few happy memories at the Irish Bank before he moved to Philadelphia. Since then he started his own successful dev shop and he also recently had his first child. Colin’s our platform guy building the back-end, which means he has to deal with some of the oldest technologies on the internet (“Damn you IMAP!”) and some of the newest (“We love you Meteor!”). For the last six years Colin’s been quick with a great joke when we need it most, but he also hits all the big milestones and deadlines, the perfect combination of hard work and humanity. He’s an entrepreneur, a great developer and he still lives clear across the country, but he’s so, so worth it. That’s the team.
I’m Marc Blinder — you can find me on the internet if you’re interested.
Originally published at emmerge.com.
