Chuck Groom Email and Phone Number

Smart Glasses Core Infrastructure, supporting multiple augmented reality initiatives.

Raccord is a data technology company that helps real estate investment and asset management teams gain visibility and insights from their complicated models and disparate data sources. The first product, a mobile application that syncs and processes complex in-house models to the cloud to extract essential metrics for teams on-the-go, has already sparked tremendous interest in the market. As the fractional CTO, I provide guidance on architecture, product strategy, establishing measurable delivery milestones, and supporting the team’s recruiting efforts.

I'm a consulting CTO, advisor, and fractional CTO/VPE for early- and growth-stage startups. My passion is helping startups find their product-market fit while building a sustainable culture of excellence. I help companies address a range of challenges - technical evaluation, M&A due diligence, designing and running an interview process to hire great engineers, rapid iteration on product design to get to market quickly, or serving as an interim technical leader. I'm accepting new clients.

Netlify builds, deploys & hosts static websites and apps. The JAMStack enables full-featured web applications that don't require the overhead and security risk of maintaining your own servers. As fractional VP of Engineering I support the 70+ person team's roadmap and planning, strategy, scalable processes, and continued hiring.

MeetElise is an AI startup that makes the residential leasing process easier for everyone, with the ultimate goal of making good housing more accessible.

I helped VTS to launch the first end-to-end commercial real estate leasing marketplace, VTS Market, which is already seeing the fastest ever adoption of any new PropTech product. I was part of the core leadership team from day one, to help us go from initial ideation to strategy to recruiting and team-building. My role has been to develop the product-business strategy, help translate that to technical requirements, coordinate delivery milestones with other parts of the business, and to recruit and manage a stellar engineering team. My current engineering organization has three squads which are rapidly growing as the business takes off.

VTS is a SaaS tech startup for commercial real estate (CRE). Landlords and brokers use our tools to manage their leases and deal workflow. VTS has a track record of success, with over 11 billion square feet and half of office buildings in the US on its platform. I manage the platform engineering teams, which includes front-end, back-end, and DevOps. Projects include VTS MarketView, our benchmarking and analytics package; building a marketplace for tenants to discover and lease properties; migrating our front-end framework from AngularJS to React; GDPR compliance; dockerizing builds; moving to a new CI provider; and balancing feature improvements with tech debt on an ongoing basis. In addition to managing people, I spend my time on recruiting; improving our communication and best practices; technical oversight; and business strategy.

Investigate and validate early-stage business concepts, including industrial IoT.

Provided company-wide software architecture guidance. Led the "Technical Leadership Council" which coordinated efforts between all principal software engineers. Researched key technologies, and gave feedback and coaching on company-wide initiatives. Projects include: global multi-datacenter strategy; architecture to decouple survey data collection from analysis; and hybrid cloud/colocation strategy.

I was the key technical stakeholder in creating SurveyMonkey Audience, a business unit that we started from scratch and grew to over $20m ARR. I designed the initial architecture and wrote the first code; then I helped to build and manage a team that eventually grew to 10 people. SurveyMonkey Audience matches businesses who want to survey certain demographics to eager panelists. Our panel is one of the highest-quality and largest in the industry because we not directly incentivize with cash, but instead let panelists donate 50 cents to charity and enter for a chance to win a gift card. Over $10 million has been donated to major charities like the Boys and Girls club. SurveyMonkey acquired Precision Polling in 2010 with the intent of having the founders (Gaurav Oberoi and me) create and lead a Seattle office.

Precision Polling is a self-service website for creating and running automated phone surveys (e.g. "Press 1 if you commute by bike..."). It costs 10 cents per call, and there are no setup fees. This makes it the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way for politicians, non-profits, and companies to collect data. We offer advanced analytics, including weighting and cross-tabs.

The Xmarks browser add-on keeps your bookmarks in between your many computers and operating systems. Xmarks leverages its corpus to provide high-quality topic search and discovery features.I worked on several engineering and user experience projects while at Xmarks. I designed and coded the user interface for the Internet Explorer add-on (C++). The graphic designer and I convinced the company to let us do a usability study on the new user account creation funnel, and made recommendations that increased conversions by 30%. I wrote the Safari add-on from scratch (a combination of Objective-C, Python, and C++). I owned the server-side feature of sharing a set of bookmarks with friends (Python and Javascript). And I created the prototypes and then full implementation of the Xmarks website front-end (Python + Pylons). While there, I had a the pleasure to work for Mitch Kapor while he was CEO, and later James Joaquin.

Obopay transfers money between people, via mobile phone or on the web. I worked in the product management team to define and mock-up projects that would improve and grow the product, to research new use cases, to run usability studies, and to own the end-to-end user experience.

BillMonk tracks informal debts between friends, on the BillMonk.com website or via a mobile phone. It is wildly successful among 20 somethings, and is used in dozens of countries and currencies. My business partner Gaurav and I founded, designed, and implemented every aspect of this bootstrapped startup, which we sold to Obopay within a year of its launch

I worked with the Item Metadata team (part of the Catalog organization) to investigate next-generation automated categorization and semantic inference solutions. For several months in a row I presented our strategic roadmap to Jeff Bezos and the leadership team, and wrote the project briefs; this work ultimately coalesced into the "Amapedia" project.Before that, I worked with the Platform Trust team to work on streamlining the A-to-z Guarantee program, making it easier for customers to report problems and get visibility into their claims, while simultaneously allowing the investigation team to more efficiently solve resolve problems and root out questionable platform sellers. Amazon sparked my passion for strong hiring practices. I became a "Bar Raiser" with the responsibility to facilitate hiring discussions and ensure consistent standards, and I led over 200 technical interviews.

Blue Mug was an embedded systems consulting company. I developed a variety of client projects, particularity to generate early-stage working prototypes. My specialty was in GUI development, which at the time required pretty low-level work in coding C. My proudest achievement was writing a word processor that, with the screen and keyboard drivers, compiled to under 8k.