Big Hair, Big Data, Big Opportunity at a Small Startup

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01 Dec

Big Hair, Big Data, Big Opportunity at a Small Startup

Written by Kelly Rice

Kinvey_new_Team_sm

If I could time travel, I wouldn’t skip back to the Roaring 20’s for some jazz, or to the 80’s for big hair. I’d go back five months. I’d find 5-months-ago-me and tell her: Dude. Don’t worry. You’re going to work for an awesome tech start-up with some very cool people. You’re good. Relax.

Fast forward to present day: Hi! I’m Kelly, and I’m the newest team member of Kinvey. I joined the team today (literally, just hours ago) as Marketing Manager and I couldn’t be more excited. I hopped on the start-up boat from the advertising industry, where I was Office Manager at a small agency called db&r.

What attracted me to the start-up community, and Kinvey in particular, was the unmistakable passion for creating something awesome, the creativity and brilliance of the people, and the big impact an individual can have on a small company. Is this a path 5-months-ago-me could have predicted I’d take? Nope. But it’s an unexpected turn I couldn’t be happier to have made.

(Note: At Kinvey, every new hire pushes something to production on their first day on the job. Here I am, pushing out a blog post 4 hours into the job. What an awesome feeling! Why don't more companies have this habit in their culture?)

I’m joined by three other awesome new hires at Kinvey, each of whom brings unique expertise and experience to the team.

Ivan Stoyanov is our new VP of Engineering. He left his position as Lead Performance Engineer at Akamai, where he led the scaling and performance initiatives for Akamai's video delivery infrastructure. So why did he leave the comfort of a big company for a start-up? The challenge. Building Kinvey's Backend as a Service platform, and delivering the platform at scale, presented an even bigger challenge for Ivan than his work for Akamai -a challenge he found compelling.

Shubhang Mani is Kinvey’s new Lead Architect. He was a database developer at Fidelity, where he worked on high-volume, realtime backend systems that supported large financial transactions. Shubhang was drawn to the prospect of truly making a difference at a company. At Kinvey, he has ownership of large parts of the platform, and his contributions move the company forward each day. He loves that the software he builds will power thousands of apps and be used by millions of people across the globe.

Kinvey’s other new hire is Brian Wilson, Senior Architect. Brian was a Senior Software Engineer at Raytheon, working on missile defense systems –projects that he can’t go into detail about, because they were top secret! However mysterious, he found his skills were stagnant when using the same technology to build software. He loves being able to expand his skills at Kinvey with new, cutting edge technology: Cloud (AWS, Rackspace and Azure) and Data Platforms (SQL and NoSQL), along with the latest Mobile SDKs and Cloud APIs.

Kinvey is quickly growing, and I am more than excited to be a part of the team. In fact, I was just visited by 5-months-from-today-me, and she said: "Dude. Just you wait. You're doing something awesome!."