What Do You Do?
I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Shortcut, which means that I do everything nobody else wants to do. Occasionally I write Clojure code but generally I try to figure out how to help people build better engineering teams.
Why Shortcut?
I’ve been building engineering teams for many years now, and I’ve seen the same problems again and again as teams grow — you either have very little structure and it’s hard to tell what’s going on or things are way too structured and it slows everything down. I’ve been working on keeping things easy for the people who have to use the tools day-to-day while also giving people insight into what’s going on — how things are running, where their team should be going.
We are trying to build something that is super easy to use for small teams but scales with you — as you grow to ten, fifty, or a hundred people — without all the complexity of a big tool, like JIRA.
If you could invite anyone living or dead, real or imaginary to your Shortcut, who would you invite and why?
I guess I’d like to invite someone who had a lot of experience with big teams and could give feedback on progress. For some reason Bill Gates springs to mind, just because he was known for a long-time as someone who gave feedback on everything, and before Microsoft became sort of a lumbering behemoth he kept everything focused and sort of on point over there…but maybe we would kick him out at some point if he got too irritating.
BTW, Shortcut is hiring! If what we’re doing sounds like what you’d like to do, check us out — https://clubhouse.io/hiring
