Building enterprise products for revenue teams, powered by Graph RAG across first-party and third-party data.

A new kind of venture firm.Root System is a collective of veteran startup founders, growth hackers, CTOs, developers, and product leaders. We do consulting for early-stage startups, and we work at steeply discounted rates in exchange for stock in the companies we serve. This "skin in the game" means we are incentivized to do a *very* good job.We help startup founders de-risk their products and technology by designing & building high-quality software and high-functioning engineering organizations. We also help those founders develop markets, raise capital, and recruit + mentor full-time staff.You can think of Root System as a seed stage venture firm, but one that invests sweat and brainpower and code (which are highly differentiated) instead of investing cash (which is not); or if you prefer, think of us as an accelerator for your product itself.Reach out if you would like to learn more: partners@rootsystem.com

Mentored awesome companies and learned a lot about venture!

Keen (https://keen.io) is a cloud-based API platform for event data ingestion & analytics. I founded and ran the company from zero to 6K customers, 60K platform developers, 100K+ total developers, over a quadrillion monthly writes, 50 headcount, and $30M in capital raised across five(ish) funding rounds, from great investors like Techstars, 500 Startups, Sequoia Capital, Rincon Venture Partners, Amplify Partners, and Pelion Venture Partners.Acquired by Scaleworks in 2017.

Here I learned a lot about teamwork, craftsmanship, software architecture, distributed systems, analytics, data science, game design, game economics, sound design, sound effects, product optimization, high-availability engineering, data scalability, high-concurrency engineering, cloud automation, code generation, domain-specific languages, API design, and a million billion other little things.I built many social applications and social games for the Facebook platform, and was a key member of a 3-person engineering team whose Facebook game (Animal Party, FKA Rescue Party) achieved 4.8 stars & 5 million players. Its excellent ARPU numbers led the game to become the firm's cash cow for years. The game was essentially Pokemon meets Farmville.My contributions included the game concept (prototype first with playing cards, then with an HTML app), nearly all of the backend game development, a linearly-scaling distributed database port as we hit viral growth, and the custom analytics system that allowed us to study player behavior in (we suspect) greater detail, and closer to realtime, than anyone else in the gaming industry (even Zynga!). My band also composed the score, and I produced the in-game sound effects.

(Acquired by Good Technologies)Web-based mobile social network with a user experience built for feature phones. Super-viral in emerging markets and leapfrog economies, because our users greatly preferred our user-to-user messaging over SMS. In a way, Mobileplay was the original WhatsApp. Sadly, the financial markets of 2008 got in our way :)Features: * Profiles and photo sharing * Public and private chat rooms * Small rendered pages * 10-key navigation on all links * Black backgrounds for better battery life * High-contrast fonts for readability * Private messages with attachments (used by many users as an alternative to expensive SMS and MMS)Our traction came from any market where people's primary computing device was a feature phone: emerging and developing countries like Indonesia and the Philippines and the inner cities and rural regions of industrialized nations like the United States.

Got my students' scores way up!Qualified as an instructor in these subjects: SAT Math (800/800)SAT Verbal (700/800)GRE Math (800/800)GRE Writing (6.0/6.0)

First gig out of college.My job was to help Google Analytics users (mostly web developers and digital marketers) figure out how to do more sophisticated analysis than Google Analytics was really designed to do.I also maintained a Firefox extension that automatically debugged the GA implementation of whatever site you're looking at. The extension was used by many of Google's support teams (mostly GA and AdWords, with some other groups in the mix as well). Users numbered in the high 100s or low 1000s. Human hours saved: we found this difficult to estimate, but I suspect a lot.I left at the end of 2007 and became the first engineer (post-reboot) at a venture-backed, mobile social networking startup.

I got to perform surgery on live pigs, dissect remote controls and gameboys and cellular phones to analyze button design, and become friends with most of the butchers in the Cincinnati area.Weird, right?