Alex Payne

Writer

New York City Metropolitan Area

Overview

Alex Payne is a writer, early-stage investor, and former CTO at Simple Finance Technology Corp with a background in technology and web development. Highlights of his career include serving as Platform Lead at Twitter and investing in companies like Shiok Meats and Orion Labs at the Series A stage. Currently based in the New York City Metropolitan Area, Alex focuses on investing in sectors such as AgTech, Security, and FinTech, with a preference for companies at the Series A, Seed, and Pre-seed stages.

Work Experience

Writer
2018 - Current

[various]

Consultant
2012 - 2016
Technical consulting to early-stage startups, non-profits, and political campaigns. Systems architecture and automation, API design, full stack software development.

Simple Finance Technology Corp.

CTO
2010 - 2012
Shipped a thoughtfully designed, reliable online banking service for web and mobile that helps people understand their spending. Hired a top-notch team of engineers, designers, operations folks, security experts, customer support specialists, and more.

Twitter

Platform Lead
2007 - 2010
Started out doing a bit of everything as Twitter grew from a side-project into a worldwide phenomenon. I then spent about two years building out our API and nurtured the community of talented third-party developers around it. I finished up my time there working on the service's backend infrastructure. Along the way I interviewed seemingly hundreds of people, met with partners, supported technical due diligence investigations, advocated for new technologies and development methodologies, and much more.

X is a social networking platform that allows its users to send and read microblogs.

Raised $12,869,191,511.00 from Greenlight Capital, Binance, Litani Ventures, Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar Holding, The Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, Fidelity, Alwaleed Bin Talal, Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital.

twitter.com

Wakapa, Inc.

Web Application Developer
2006 - 2007
Was the sole developer for a prototype website for a storytelling social network startup aimed at an older target demographic of users.