42 People This Startup CEO is Thankful For

November 28, 2013

Last night, I had a brief text message exchange with our VP of Engineering, Wim De Pril, about a possible downtime event. It was a false alarm, but he freaked out initially, and then joked:

Thank god. It is thx giving. So amazon may go down.

Last Thanksgiving, Wim wasn’t working for FullContact yet, but we actually DID have an outage, which prompted a blog post last year titled 31 People This Startup Founder is Thankful For.

As FullContact has enjoyed success and has grown up a bit the last year, the list of people I’m thankful for has grown.

Here is my updated list for 2013, in no particular order:

My wife Sarah. We’ve been married just over a year and her patience with me is remarkable. She’s my best investment yet.
Our dog Parker. No matter the type of day I’ve had, or how much crazy shit is thrown my way, he still just wants a belly rub.
My outstanding Board of Directors that includes T.A. McCann, Chris Marks and Brad Feld. They understand the instrinsic difficulty of entrepreneurship, and are relentlessly supportive and helpful.
My CEO coach Jerry Colonna — ‘the best CEO coach on the planet’ — I’m thankful for his help, guidance and ability to listen.
My outstanding network of fellow CEOs in the Boulder / Denver area. It’s a peer group that has been invaluable to me as they all ‘get’ the unique challenges of the job.
My co-founders Travis Todd and Dan Lynn. They’ve been there since the beginning when the founders didn’t receive paychecks for 2 years. So they can appreciate how far we’ve come when a FullContact employee asks about their ‘career path’ at the company 😉
Ben Deda — has done an amazing job as a community leader in addition to leading FullContact’s efforts in Sales, Marketing and Service . He’s an outstanding and reliable executive leader with tremendous execution discipline.
Wim De Pril — has transformed our engineering in the past 12 months. Our code quality has increased, the quality of engineers he continues to bring onboard continues to impress, and he’s instilled engineering rigor. His tireless efforts, commitment to excellence and round-the-clock efforts have allowed us to scale.
Jeanette Russell — she’s done it all on the BizOps side. She works nearly as many hours as I do, and is always just ‘getting shit done’ — whether it’s onboarding of new employees, board financial reports, or getting the payroll out the door. She’s done a stellar job and I can’t remember our company before she was onboard.
Chris Elliott — his talent level always astounds me. He’s a world class designer and he combines that with a relentless work ethic. We’re lucky to have him.
Brad McCarty — he knows his craft well and I’m delighted to watch him grind away at producing killer content that demonstrates FullContact’s position of thought leadership in the marketplace.
Lauren Wiper — one of the smartest, quickest and resourceful people I’ve ever been around. I’m thankful we have both her energy and her relentless desire to be great on our side.
David Fitzgerald — he handles the entire support desk with a calm and professional demeanor that is beyond words. I’m NOT thankful for David eliminating me from the FullContact fantasy league playoffs, but I’m sure he’ll receive payback soon 🙂
Kipp Chambers — he’s relentless about improving the engineering discipline behind our marketing efforts. Marketing boils down to ‘Creating a Customer’ and Kipp brings it every single day.
Andrew Vojslavek — he’s one of the most passionate and determined sales people I’ve met. I love people that practice honing their craft outside of working hours. Andrew does just that.
Carly Wennogle — she has an infectious energy and a smile on her face that makes her a joy to be around. I’m thankful for her good cheer that lights up the office.
Matt Hubbard — he has stepped up in a huge way this past year. He handles the relentless flood of ideas and feature requests from users about our Address Book product along with my own demands and manages to balance everything. He’s extremely reliable — if he’s asked once to do something, it will get done. Period.
James Williamson — he brings a level of professional product management and attention to detail to our organization that I appreciate every day. He interfaces with everyone in the organization with ease and he’s a pleasure to work with.
Duane Schleen — he’s the seasoned veteran developer of the group — and has the battle scars to prove it. He’s passionate about building great software, which makes it easy for everyone to get along with him.
Matt Elliott — he’s an outstanding engineer that ‘gets shit done.’ As the company has grown up, Matt has grown into an ever-increasing leadership role. Matt is reliable and has built an unparalelled level of trust with his team through constant, steady performance
Brent Haldiman — his passion, drive and desire to WIN is awesome. Every company needs people that simply refuse to lose.
Michael Rose — he has amazed with me his attention to detail and persistence in scaling an ever-growing infrastructure. Michael is an incredibly talented engineer that bleeds FullContact Red.
Kurt Harriger — his persistence this past year has been phenomenal. I’m thankful for his relentless pursuit of high quality software.
Brandon Vargo — he has impressed me with his extraordinary attention to detail combined with a Hemmingway-esque approach to writing code. He has volunteered to step up and take on some of the most difficult engineering assignments, and for that, I am extremely thankful.
Ken Michie — Ken brings the proverbial lunch pail to work every day. I am thankful for his work ethic and his drive to make things ‘industrial strength’ as he would say. Ken understands quality, and we all appreciate quality.
Skylar Lowery — I love Skylar’s attention to detail. He consistently unearths design issues or edge cases that weren’t considered previously. That’s what great developers do. I’m thankful he finds these issues and not end users.
Craig Langenfeld — his desire to be great at his craft is contagious. I am thankful he decided to join us.
Minh Pham — I am thankful for Minh’s willingness to jump in and fight fires at a moments notice. Minh brings a fun energy to the office that makes him a joy to hang out with.
Dennis Stinn — he’s a consummate professional. As a ‘Software Engineer in Test’ one’s job is to constantly break things. Dennis does that spectacularly well, and I love his straightforward approach to building great software.
Matthew Kruse — he’s built some amazingly robust test and QA systems for FullContact. His work lets me sleep at night, knowing that all systems are ‘green’ — or if they are not, we know about it!
Eric Entzel — he’s shown tremendous leadership in tackling the thorniest of issues: syncing and integrations. He’s taken an engineering approach and his engineering excellence helps me rest easy knowing that ‘Eric’s got it’
Zach Arlen — he’s jumped in feet first in one of our most difficult code bases, and emerged unscathed. He’s been a steady, calming force on our engineering team and is a dude you always want to grab a beer with. He’s candid and easy to work with. I’m thankful he’s on our team.
Charles Sullivan — he’s the puppet master of our infrastructure. A true A-player in DevOps, he keeps everything running, even when Amazon goes down 😉
Jason Lingle — his fanatical approach to robust, quality code has been a lifesaver. I am thankful for his detail orientation and ability to execute.
Steven Ruppert — he has a common sense approach to engineering that is well beyond his years. He just ‘gets it’
Alex Borden — his optimism and enthusiasm are a tremendous asset to the team. If you look in his eyes, he believes he can do anything. And with that attitude, he will.
All of our Investors. They believed in us when nobody else would.
All of our existing customers and users. Without you, we are nothing.
All of our private beta users. And all the rest that keep coming back, waiting to get in. I am thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving, to one and all.

Now time to go eat and drink myself into a coma while watching football 😉