Ryan Choi

EM & Product Engineer at Y Combinator

EM & Product Engineer
2023 - Current
After the YC batch ends, YC continues to help our founders build their companies through hiring, fundraising, advice with YC Partners, and more. Our team writes software and runs events to benefit the YC Alumni network of over 4,000 companies and 10,000 active & former founders. And I still get to code, every day. How awesome is that?
Director, Work at a Startup
2019 - 2023
I help people connect directly with founders for jobs at YC startups. This includes building workatastartup.com, running events to introduce YC startups and their teams, and making introductions to founders and hiring managers. Highlights include: • Help over 2,000 people land jobs at 1K+ YC startups in the last few years, including engineers, PMs, COS, Directors, VPs, co-founders, interns and more. • Grow our platform to 10x candidates and 10x jobs by building better hiring tools and candidate experiences, including YC job boards, Quick Apply and ATS/Linkedin integrations. • Run regular training sessions and job expos to uplevel hiring and recruiting at our YC startups. • Growing YC's own software team, sourcing and hiring 11 of our 18 teammates (using our own workatastartup.com platform).

Advisor & Investor
2012
Serve startups through advising & early stage funding, including Hubspot (HUBS), Interviewed (Acq. Indeed), Whatnot (W20), Okay (W20), Bouncer (Acq. Stripe) and more.

Lead Product Manager
2016 - 2019
Managed 4 product managers and led cross-functional teams of 30+ across engineering, design, analytics & operations. Focus areas included: • Finance: Guided Lyft to $2.2B IPO by building revenue automation for $3.6B annual revenue across all business lines. Led design and implementation of managerial financial reporting for FP&A teams. • Identity: Ensure the online safety and security of users across our 14 million rides every month. Include login & signup, account access & account security. Drove account takeover from $XXXK to $0 losses, weekly. • Platform & Partnerships: Drove 100K+ rides, weekly via native integrations with Facebook, Google & Apple. Develop API & SDKs to drive loyalty partnerships with Starbucks, JetBlue and Delta.

Head of Partner Engineering, US
2013 - 2016
• Managed team of 10 engineers to drive adoption of Twitter's complete platform (ads, data, mobile & web) with top partners including Apple, Google, Target, Square & Tableau. • Designed & launched new Twitter products, including Twitter Cards & Polls. Generated over $52.6M in revenue, and used by top brands and advertisers including ESPN, Starbucks, Honda, Dove and Lionsgate. • Drove platform adoption through developer marketing, code and documentation. Re-built developer docs & case studies (https://dev.twitter.com/), launched TwitterDev on GitHub, managed developer support (Discourse, JIRA), outreach & events.

Co-Founder & Head of Product (Y Combinator, W13)
2012 - 2013
• Designed and developed product with growth & engagement mindset. Achieved 70% daily actives, 20% monthly growth and 32K users over 1st year. • Developed business plan and investor pitch. Raised $130K+ from Y Combinator, SV Angel and others.

Director of Engineering
2008 - 2010
• Managed engineering and QA team of 40+ people. Responsible for core product lines including platform, CRM, payments and billing. Reported directly to CEO. • Worked with Product Management and QA on go-to-market of 25+ features over ten releases. Responsible for defining and executing on platform strategy and scalability initiatives for billing platform. • Implemented agile release process (scrum) and collaboration tools that enabled consistent monthly release cycles. Built initial test infrastructure and rolled out through team to that resulted in automated Jenkins framework of 20K+ tests on nightly run. * Managed relationships and integrations for early customers. Represented product and engineering in sales deals and marketing initiatives. * Hands-on contributor, designed and implemented Zuora APIs and Salesforce Sync. Built using Java (Hibernate/Struts) and MySQL.

Lead Software Engineer
2000 - 2008
• As the 7th software engineer at Salesforce, I designed and developed the API, the first marketing suite, mail merge functionality, and the company's internal billing system. I also managed and advised partners and customers on developing with the Salesforce.com platform. • Led 10 person engineering team in development of wealth management product. Worked closely with Product Management and Quality Assurance to design, implement and test product. Drove growth of company by 25K licenses and over $10M revenue. * Led due diligence for first technology acquisitions, including Salesforce.com Mobile and Salesforce.com for Google AdWords. Patent review, employee evaluations, integration and strategy.