Founder, Chief Technology Officer (2010-2020) - Chief Product Officer (2020-)
Andrew Montalenti
Founding CTO of Parse.ly, bringing content analytics to all. See https://angel.co/parse-ly
Parse.ly was acquired by Automattic (creators of WordPress.com) in February 2021.
Over a decade on fully distributed teams as a SaaS & web startup CTO.
Founding CTO of Parse.ly, bringing content analytics to all. See https://angel.co/parse-ly
Parse.ly was acquired by Automattic (creators of WordPress.com) in February 2021.
Over a decade on fully distributed teams as a SaaS & web startup CTO.
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Experience
Exit
Founder
Projects
Education
About
Achievements
- Founded Parse.ly in 2009 with Sachin Kamdar, my co-founder. Began as a bootstrapped startup in the content monitoring space. Joined Dreamit Ventures accelerator in 2009. Relocated to Philly to start up.
- From 2011-2012, recruited and ran the fully distributed product / design / engineering team that built & shipped Parse.ly's product. Hit ship dates on a shoestring budget of $800K in seed financing. Helped company secure its first customers.
- From 2013-2016, raised a $5M Series A round that allowed us to scale our MVP to the market. Redesigned our system for 10-100x its scale. Succeeded in shipping that second system atop a more advanced architecture, using novel streaming analytics & parallelism techniques.
- From 2017-2018, raised Series B growth round, with $6.8M in new capital. Executed on an ambitious growth plan.
- From 2019-2020, continued growth with amazing unit economics. Promoted senior engineer to CTO role. Took over product strategy as Chief Product Officer (CPO).
- From 2020-2021, repositioned Parse.ly's product for the broader vision of a leading content analytics system, a measurement layer above content management systems. In late 2020, was part of the small deal team working on an M&A discussion with Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com and WordPress VIP (aka WPVIP). In February 2021, that transaction closed, and Parse.ly was acquired by Automattic, in their "largest acquisition by cost and revenue" (WSJ, Feb. 8, 2021).
- In June 2021, I kicked off a new hiring wave for Parse.ly's product team, as we invest in areas like Vue.js focused frontend engineering; massively parallel data processing with Python 3; highly automated DevOps with Ansible & Terraform; and modern machine learning with Python and cloud tools.
- Now playing in the bigger sandbox of WPVIP, which has a staff of 200+ focused on enterprise content teams, itself a part of Automattic, a company of 1,500+ people, and one of the largest fully distributed teams on the planet, as well as one of the biggest champions of open web and open source technologies.
Describe the most impressive thing you've done.
Skills
Locations
Q&A
What's the most useful business-related book you've ever read?
"Beyond Entrepreneurship"
What's your favorite non-business book?
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
What's your super power?
Leading distributed teams that ship.
What's the best way for people to get in touch with you?
Email or Twitter.
What words of wisdom do you live by?
"It’s useful to think of achievement as a process of discovery. We can think of painting a masterpiece as discovering it in the set of all possible images. It’s as if we're searching through them all for the one we want, which we call our objective."
What aspects of your work are you most passionate about?
Stunning colleagues. Large-scale data analytics. Elegant data visualization. Pushing the abilities of Python and JavaScript to their limits. The art of programming. The thrill of shipping.
What was the most impactful class you took in school?
Advanced Operating Systems (NYU, 2004-2006).
Which founders or startups do you most admire?
- Reed Hastings at Netflix.
- Shay Banon at Elastic.
- Mitchell Hashimoto at HashiCorp.
- Jason Lemkin at Saastr.
- Jerry Neumann at NeuVC.
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