Jessica Lam

About

Achievements

I've led engineering from company inception to scaling at multiple startups, operating as founder CTO or comparable technical roles with a focus on executing fast and well in a startup context. A reputation as a 10x engineer that's also a unicorn capable of quality UI/UX design and product thinking.

Designed and scaled LoungeBuddy's infrastructure that supported our iPad product in American Express Centurion lounges and many top airport lounges around the world. Led a remote engineering team in successfully launching and supporting 5 integrated products that ultimately led to the company's acquisition in 2018 - partners API for purchase and lounge eligibility search worldwide, iPad app for lounges, consumer iOS app, web site with search and purchasing experience, internal tools for managing all partner lounges and permission management.

Joined Notion as co-founder in 2014 via acquisition of my startup in collaboration tools that I founded with a colleague I worked with at Apple.

Describe the most impressive thing you've done.

Skills

iOS Development Amazon Web Services Product Development Back-End Development Full Stack Development Software Engineering Software Architecture Infrastructure Information Architecture Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Product Design Machine Learning

Locations

San Francisco New York City Los Angeles

Experience

Astrid Media

Founder

Exit

LoungeBuddy-American Express

Chief Architect / VP Engineering 2014 - 2018 (about 4 years)

- 1st engineer, system architect for API, 2 iOS apps, 2 web apps, built and architected backend systems with close to 0% downtime. Led engineering efforts across all products... more

Notion

Founder, Engineer, co-founder

Backend services, permission management, universal search

Exit

Sugarbox

Founder, CTO

AWS, web sockets, backend services, recording and replaying of frontend event streaming

23andMe

Mobile Lead

Apple

Senior Software Engineer

Sony Pictures Interactive

Staff software engineer - web / mobile

Pioneered iOS development at the org when iOS SDK 1st came out, designed and implemented one of the 1st iPad apps in the Apple Appstore ever, invited to Apple to test it on... more

NCSA

Employee

Founder

Sugarbox, Notion, Astrid Media

Employee

Apple, 23andMe, LoungeBuddy-American Express, NCSA, Sony Pictures Interactive

Education

Q&A

What's the most useful business-related book you've ever read?

Principles - Ray Dalio

What's your favorite non-business book?

Amusing Ourselves to Death

If money were not an issue, what would you be doing right now?

Running a foundation that solves the problems of capital allocation in education and equalization of wealth creation opportunities for disadvantaged communities, maximizing individual potential in spite of background and systemic privileges.

What words of advice would you give your younger self?

People will always tell you you can't, no matter how many times and how often you prove them wrong. Do it anyways, you never know until you try.

When doors close, don't wait for another to open, make your own door.

Jessica Lam

Entrepreneur. Advisor. Investor. Technical and product advisor and investor focused on seed / pre-seed companies.

Entrepreneur. Advisor. Investor.

Technical and product advisor and investor focused on seed / pre-seed companies.