Greetings and Welcome!
You've reached John Davison.
I code, manage and empathize.
I help teams produce software.
Accomplishments
- StartupLandia.io, Founder, CTO, PM, sold and executed on $2.2M in services revenue, 2019 - Current
- Happilabs.org, CTO and PM support scaled from 2 customers in 2015, participated in Y-Combinator, current 80+ customers, 2015-2023
- Fogbender.com, Provided fundraising and PM services enabling team to raise seed funding and participate in Y-Combinator, 2020-2023
- Privateequitycxo.com, Provided CTO and PM services enabling complete rebuild of broken talent management platform, 2021-2023
- Thecrucible.com, Provided CTO and PM services while building a greenfield psychometric evaluations platform geared at Private Equity industry, 2023
- Teamedupapp.com, Provided Full Stack Product Development services to green field a chat app aimed at supporting U.S. base medical doctor community, 2020-2023
- Able.com, Provided CTO services enabling the onboarding of 8 contract engineers resulting in 3 key hires, 2020-2022
- Kestela.com, Provided Full Stack Product Development services to green field a financial services data synchronization and reporting tool, 2022
- Lyte.com, As Senior UI Engineer and Internal Tools PM, developed and built core decision making tools that became critical IP, 2017-2018
- Mybrightwheel.com, Built founding product platform enabling future fundraising of $88M including success on Shark Tank, 2015-2016
- HipCamp.com, Helped founder Alyssa Ravaiso make her first moves into programming via Dev Bootcamp leading to founding of HipCamp, 2012
Principles
- Action over perfection
- Building the future requires having a well reasoned plan
- Design is a conversational process that enables learning about problems
- Writing code is basically the opposite of acquiring users
- Recruit, recruit, recruit, ideas, people, motivational energy
- Give graceful negative feedback, give authentic positive feedback
- Be very careful around business deals where the counterparty has no skin in the game
- Selling is the process of finding someone's budget and then help them spend more
- A good MVP needs to be 30-50% effective, visually it needs to be a little cringy
Experience
StartupLandia.io Founder, CEO, CTO and PM
A boutique consultancy serving early stage founders, 2019-Current- Sold, executed and managed $2.2M in services revenue
- Sourced and managed 5 designers and 18 developers to support 20,000 billable hours
- Served founders, provided world class software product development
Lyte.com, Senior UI Engineer, Internal Tools PM
Music industry startup aimed at secondary ticket market, 2017-2018- Built and managed all internal tools
- Created visualizations, written from scratch that became core IP
- Developed engineering recruiting funnel and hiring process, doubled engineering team
Full Stack Web Engineer
Freelance engineer to Bay Area startups, 2013-2017- Worked with founding teams at BrightWheel, CrowdSound, Airpair, CodeUnion
- Provided contracted engineering to Twitch, Appcelerator, Roostify, CloudCity, Threadflip
Technical Skills
- Full Stack Web Engineering, Ruby on Rails, Node JS, Python, Heroku, AWS, Docker, Figma
- Business Analytics, Excel, Sheets, SQL, DCF/IRR, Xero, Quickbooks, Harvest, Stripe, Plaid
- Product Operations, Notion, Github, Asana, Linear, Superhuman, Mixpanel, Google Analytics
Education
- PM HQ - Product Management Certification - 2019
- Dev Bootcamp - Full Stack Software Engineering - 2012
- Project Management Professional PMP Certification - 2010
- Thunderbird - MBA, 3.9 gpa, Chartered Financial Analyst CFA Level I - 2009
- Dalian University of Foreign Languages - Independent Mandarin Studies - 2007
- Instituto Cervantes de Nápoles - Independent Spanish Studies - 2005
- Northern Arizona University - B.S. Environmental Science - 2000
Oh By the Way...
- My career started as a Logistics Officer in the US Navy
- Last count, I've seen 90+ countries
- My first gig in Silicon Valley was a Sales Analyst at HP
- When I'm not working, I travel, eat healthy food and lift kettle bells
- I spent 5 years studying martial arts with communites connected to Bruce Lee
- My swim habits influenced many friends to become members at the Dolphin Club
To Live is to Embrace Uncertainty