Joining SPREAD to bring actionable Product Knowledge at engineers’ fingertips

Engineering for Engineers

Joining SPREAD feels like the perfect alignment of my passion for engineering and my experience in applying cutting-edge technology to solve real-world problems.  As someone with a background in Electrical Engineering and experience working on productizing applied data and machine learning, I’ve always been driven by the potential for software to reshape engineering practices.

Some of you know that over the years, I’ve built robotic autonomous foosball tables to play against and built software to help kids learn to program by programming a small robotic vehicle. I’ve found an immense sense of joy working on these, but little things always go wrong between the hardware, wiring, mechanical components, firmware, and software and debugging the failures is frustrating as an engineer.  As a business, the lost time debugging and fixing these problems is lost time to market, lost money and lost innovation.

The core mission of SPREAD — Make product data the most accessible, intuitive, and actionable for every engineer to empower them to innovate better and faster — deeply resonates with me.  Engineers have always experienced complexity - it’s kind of a core part of the job - but especially as electrical and mechanical products and systems become software-defined and highly interdependent, it’s meant this overcomplexity is increasingly not just an engineer’s job but an entire organization’s.  Getting the potentially terabytes of telemetry, logs, design, specs, datasheets, and other engineering data into the right shape has become an intertangled organizational collaboration mess that SPREAD is solving to catalyze a new era of innovation.

Knowledge is Power

As the saying goes, knowledge is power.  But knowledge in companies gets siloed, dispersed in disconnected spreadsheets and lost in translation.  Engineers need to ask other engineers how to interpret and reconcile.  Combine it with industry-unique systems that are difficult to navigate without specific expertise, and you can quickly see why it’s just hard to move quickly in a large organization with a complex product.  SPREAD’s approach of breaking down silos within these companies and transforming how engineers interact with data really helps peel the layers back for everyone.  A lot of my career has been focused on answering the question “how do we get knowledge to the people that need it the most as quickly and actionable as possible?”  I’m excited to have the opportunity to help drive this vision and execution forward at SPREAD.

The Team to Drive Innovation Forward

As part of my interviews with the SPREAD team, it was clear they’d assembled an all-star team of innovators and doers with a ton of industry experience.  There’s an overwhelming amount of automotive and manufacturing engineering and AI experience that not only “get” customers with these complex problems because they’ve lived it but also know how to solve them with product data and AI. They’re passionate about building products that use this expertise and really moving the needle for their customers.  

The Need for Speed

From my first interviews with the SPREAD team on, it has been very clear that SPREAD really understands the importance of taking calculated risks and executing quickly to drive significant results for customers.  There are regions of the world and certain industries where AI and rapid development practices are still in early stages.  At times, these illicit fear and fundamental concerns of trust and stability.

When I moved from San Francisco to Berlin in 2024, I started seeing just how thriving startup innovation here really is.  SPREAD is embracing these technologies head-on and helping their customers do so as well.  But we are doing so in an intentional way: it has been really inspiring to me to hear how focused SPREAD is on having an amazing uptime, trusted AI capabilities, and its own robust engineering and security practices.

I’m excited to bring my experience from several hyper-growth and trusted engineering-focused startups to help rapidly scale these efforts.  I’m looking forward to specifically bring my experience in applied AI and solutions to complex data problems to help my fellow SPREADsters and SPREAD’s customers rapidly achieve new stages of growth!