I do growth for developer products. I also write the code.

Groupthink

Cofounder, CTO, then CEO, and the entire engineering team

Groupthink came out of the Firstparty pivot. I was CTO for the first year. In January 2024 my cofounder and I switched roles and I became CEO. Today it is relationship intelligence for people who run on meetings, and I write, review, and ship all of it with AI agents.

• Took engineering throughput from 15 merged PRs in January 2026 to 707 in August. September passed that in three weeks. The record with a team of five was 287.
• Took all-in cost per merged pull request from $430 to $42 in August. Monthly burn fell from $104K to about $30K.
• Repositioned the company in March 2026 from a meeting notetaker, a category Google and Zoom commoditized, to a relationship intelligence platform.
• Run the whole company as markdown in git (strategy, decisions, runbooks) so an agent can read it.

Switching from CTO to CEO → How I work with Claude Code → The numbers →

Firstparty

Cofounder and CTO

I started Firstparty with Jonathan Kressaty, who had worked with me at Mattermark. We built marketing analytics for developers. After Mattermark I had decided my sweet spot was reporting to the CEO instead of being one, so I took the CTO role for the first time.

• Funded within 48 hours of tweeting about the idea; raised a $5.7M seed in 2022.
• Owned engineering as CTO. We never found product/market fit and pivoted rather than coast. The pivot became Groupthink.

Why CTO this time →

GitLab

GM of Meltano, then Senior Director of Growth Marketing

I came back to work after the sabbatical to run an internal startup, then the growth team, reporting to the CEO for the first year. Working at GitLab changed what I thought work and life could look like together.

• Ran Meltano as an internal startup, hired my own replacement, and it spun out with a $4.2M seed led by GV.
• Built the growth marketing team. Left shortly before the IPO.

FullContact

VP Product, after the acquisition

FullContact bought Mattermark in December 2017, and we moved to Denver to close the deal. I stepped into the VP Product role to land the plane. My last day was May 4, 2018. Then I took the rest of the year off, self-funded.

• Ran the integration: legacy product shutdowns, GDPR compliance, and a roadmap and requirements process for the product team.

This storm is you → The sabbatical →

Mattermark

Cofounder and CEO

Mattermark started as spreadsheets. After Referly I set out to write a post every day, ranking startups, and collecting the data by hand took twenty hours a story. So we turned the spreadsheets into code: crawlers, APIs, and quality checks. When our investors asked what we were working on, we showed them what we called the story generator. It became the deal intelligence company. We started it with the $350K left from Referly.

• Union Square Ventures was the first paying customer. Revenue reached about $3M ARR and the team peaked at seventy.
• Started the Mattermark Daily and wrote it for the first 18 months. It reached more than 100,000 readers, and 60,000 opened it every day at the peak.
• My husband, Kevin, was my cofounder and CTO.
• Spent nine months selling the company. The sale did not clear preferences, so common stock, mine included, went to zero. I wrote about all of it.

Mattermark wasn't a pivot → Introducing Mattermark → The last Mattermark Daily → What the sale cost me →

Referly

Founder and CEO, Y Combinator Summer 2012

I met my cofounder, Al Abut, at the first Startup Weekend in San Francisco in April 2009. I pitched the idea for Referly at another Startup Weekend that October, and it got a collective yawn. I kept coming back to it. In May 2012 we launched Referly and announced we were in Y Combinator's summer batch. It paid people to recommend products they owned and loved.

• Raised $1M during YC and grew to ten people.
• Paul Graham told me, "You're just too plausible. It's as if someone was writing a sitcom about startups and you needed a believable idea."
• In March 2013 I wrote publicly that Referly had died. The idea was wrong, so we killed it instead of running a zombie.
• Three of us were left, with $350K in the bank. We cut our salaries to nothing and started over. That became Mattermark.

Starting Referly took me three years → Zombie startups →

Twilio

First marketing hire, through Director

Evan Cooke, one of the three cofounders, offered me the job as Twilio's first hire. I told him I could do it, but marketing could never become a second-class citizen to software development. For the first weeks I worked out of borrowed office space and coffee shops and lived in a $49-a-night motel in the Presidio.

• Ran marketing to developers through Twilio's first 100,000 customers.
• Built the team from zero to eighteen people over three years, including the developer evangelists. Started the customer success team.
• Worked the hackathon circuit with the evangelists, TechCrunch Disrupt included, and spoke at developer events.
• Launched the Twilio Conference and the Twilio Fund.
• Hired Twilio's first international employee, a developer evangelist in London, and did evangelism across Europe myself.
• Launched Twilio SMS, and wrote the demo apps and screencasts that sold it.
• Forbes 30 Under 30.

Marketing is not a second-class citizen → Six on the team → Forbes 30 Under 30 →

Pelago (Whrrl)

Data team lead and community manager

My first startup job, around employee twenty, at a location check-in app later acquired by Groupon. I did two jobs at once. I ran the data team collecting place data from local businesses, and I was the community manager: blogging, press, and user acquisition experiments like flash mobs, YouTube videos, and an ambassador program. I was events editor at Seattle 2.0 on the side.