Honey in Boulder
Earlier this year I joined Honey in order to help them scale product and development beyond their headquarters in Los Angeles. The company is growing rapidly and in a look toward the future, it wanted to distribute and diversify its ability to build software. I’d been involved in the company in advisorship and investor capacities over the years, and their desire to scale beyond Los Angeles coincided with mine to get back into building software sustainably in a full-time capacity; right place, right time.
Honey’s in a rare position. They have something every company wants: millions and millions of users and the beginning of a hockey stick. I’ve seen, and have participated in, incredible growth, but prior to Honey, I’d only ever read about growth (existing, and projected) like this. I’ve never actually sat in the saddle of a hockey stick; it’s trippy.
When revenue maps to growth like that, a company gets to do some impressive things. Chiefly, they are able to place bets and take risks that others cannot. They’re able to explore new product areas and invest in tangential industries that are generally considered new/different companies altogether, and therefore rarely get to be pursued by existing team members. Honey’s able to leverage its wealth of activity and usage into new fields. While the fundamentals have to be in place for that to even be an option, it takes strong leadership to effectively create and support these kinds of efforts. It’s not easy running a large business and firing up new ones alongside. Yet, here we are. I’m beyond impressed with Honey’s senior leadership team; careful, calculated risk.
Over the past several months the start of our team in Boulder has come together. New people with new backgrounds and experiences coming together to sustainably build software. We’re working on backend systems stuff in a new product area. We’re blending new ways of doing with an existing core system built on top of Google’s Cloud Platform (which is new for me... I come from AWS land). Aspects of the system move data at thousands-of-transactions-per-second rates, so we have our hands full. But, that, coupled with greenfield product, makes it fun and engaging and challenging. Node, Scala, microservices, PubSub, and the GCP toolchain. Our VP of Engineering, Sam Aronoff has some posts up on our tech blog here.
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