Matthew Spence Email & Phone Number

San Diego, Ca, Us

London, England, United Kingdom

Canterbury, England, United Kingdom

stablishing operations and providing all necessary technical solutions. Sourcing and/or implementing software to facilitate marking, sales, operations, and customer support, quickly and efficiently, with minimal cost.Additionally everything and anything required getting a bootstrapped start up ecommerce store off the ground. This truly was a many hats role, and at times included stepping well out my comfort zone into areas such as marketing and sales.Created packaging, fulfilment and support processes that have delivered industry leading dispatch times and customer satisfaction (trustpilot.com, reviews.io). Built an ecommerce fulfilment team with specialist skills around the care and dispatch of live plants from scratch. Procured and out fitted a warehouse space optimised for the business's operations. Created and nutured leadership roles within the team, gradually transferring responsiblity to make teams self managing.Implemented bespoke software to meet the legal requirements for the distribution of plants. Designed and built to satify statutory standards with the absolute minimum impact on warehouse operations.

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Plan and execute architecture, and end-to-end implementation of the company's customer facing analytics and reports product. Ensuring quality of work for contributing engineers assigned to the analytics team. Liaise and coordinate with other teams, specifically system administrators, and Head of Engineering. Define and outline product requirements and vision with Head of Product.Work under other teams as required in the fast paced and dynamic environment of a start up. Including but not limited to: integrations, search, mobile, and API. Build code and systems to enable rapid product iteration balancing the tradeoffs of functionality, quality & technical debt.Groove is a fully remote team distributed across several timezones. This role required a high level of autonomy solving complex problems alone when other team members were simply offline. Equally it required planning and colaboration with a number of teams and individuals spread across said timezones.AchievementsUsing a mixture of an off the shelf event streaming platform (keen.io), augmented with a bespoke in house system built on Elastic Search, we were able to deliver a powerful reporting product quickly and efficiently. This hybrid approach meant our solution wasn't confined by the limitations of the 3rd party product but was still able to leverage many of its benefits.Utilized a number of existing systems already in place to create a highly resiliant data collection endpoint that boasted 99.99% uptime.

London, United Kingdom

Produce bug free, future proofed code, setting the standard by which others developers work. Translate the needs of the business into solutions. Working to and on the company values, the team standards and best practices.Identify, react quickly and take ownership of any serious problems with quality. Improve the performance and development of the team. Sharing and supporting individuals by helping create team processes, following them and enforcing their use by others. Identify technical potential in others and work with them to improve.Staying abreast of what’s going on in the industry and using this to improve skills and/or the skills of others. Working on a range of systems and constantly update any gaps in knowledge.Work closely with the leaders of the business and external contacts. Communicate well, be supportive, flexible and take a balanced view between tech and business need. Create constructive and positive debate around solution creation. Foresee and tactfully explain the risks involved, presenting solutions where necessary.

Canterbury

Helping companies increase activation and reduce churn by understanding their users better. Executed a number of pivots searching for a repeatable and scalable business model. Each time creating hypotheses and testing them.As the CTO I was responsible for planning, building, managing, and documenting several production services and client libraries from scratch. I implemented the provisioning of our hardware infrastructure on AWS using Chef, along with service monitoring and redundancy, having had no previous experience of SysAdmin. I recruited and managed all our technical employees and contractors, managing their on boarding, training, and providing direction and mentorship for their personal development. Utilizing online tools to collaborate remotely, often across timezones.Working on Trakio has been the single most informative period of my life. Coming to San Francisco, interviewing for YC, taking part in the Alchemist Accelerator, experiencing nacho "cheese", the people I have met, the lessons I have learned. It has been eye opening to say the least.

I conceived and delivered a working prototype as a proof of concept inside of two weeks. I led and managed the team that then fleshed this concept into an off the shelf solution to generate and manage leads from long form content marketing. The product we built enabled customers to achieve conversion rate increases of 122-200%, and secured us a 6 month up front contract with GFK. Both myself and my cofounder sold our stakes to pursue other ideas.While at Fruitbowl, a client came to us with a problem. We immediately saw the resell value in the solution and spun it out into its own startup: Virally, a lead generation tool for companies with downloadable content marketing. It uses social network authentication to easily and seemlessly submit users' details in return for valuable downloadable content.My cofounder and I realised it was heading in a direction that we weren't passionate about, and had limited long term sustainablilty issues with increased public awareness around privacy and personal data. We both sold our stake in Virally to our investors to start Trakio.

I increased the size and breadth of the company's portfolio by adding more advanced web application work. I built a team capable of delivering this more complex work by recruiting an additional designer and developer, and training existing staff.I started working with Fruitbowl Media as a freelancer in November 2011, and it wasn't long before they asked me to join them full time as lead developer, to expand their current bread and butter of static marketing sites toward larger web application projects.I wasn't at Fruitbowl long before we decided to spin out one such project we were working on with a client into its own fledgling company.

Canterbury, United Kingdom

I built and maintained several key systems including the University's password reset system, on boarding for new students and online maps. I successfully managed the implementation and launch of the University's student fee gateway by a 3rd party vendor, a service that processes tens of millions of pounds in tuition each year. I oversaw the transition of the main marketing site's web framework, a key component of the University's web presence, to this team. I led the adoption of agile processes, working to refine a scrum based process that allowed us to be an agile team within a slow and bureaucratic department. I implemented and consulted on several user experience improvements across various teams and services which contributed to a raise in our student satisfaction rating, the key performance metric for our department.After graduating I moved from my part time roll into a full time position, and switched to a team that was responsible for many of the University's online web applications.I am most proud of the transition the team made during the time that I worked there, and my contribution to that transition. When I started we were a poorly performing team with very little coherence, struggling to deal with the bureaucracy of the wider organization. By the time I left we had implemented continuous improvement and evolved our own flavor of agile scrum that allowed us to function most effectively given the constraints of the environment in which we operated.

Bachelor’S Degree, Multimedia Design And Technology, 2:1

Activities and Societies: Rugby, SnowsportsA course that can be described as computer science with an emphasis on graphic design and web.

Education record

Activities and Societies: Cadet's, Duke of Edinburgh Gold, RugbyMy high school education lacked any formal programming education but that.