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Writing about yourself is weird… but I should explain how we got here.
Many moons ago, I was a bored, under-stimulated mobile software engineer (iOS at that time), working from one corporate contract job to a startup, then to another corporate contract job. The New York commuter life wasn’t for me, regardless of how cool Steve Jobs was at the time.
One day, after complaining to my less understanding Soviet family, I was shipped to a country that I couldn’t pronounce, to study with a guy that I didn’t know (you’d be surprised how small the Soviet physics community is… thanks, mom).
That guy turned out to be one of the best backend software engineers I ever met. He taught me everything I knew about architecture, which in essence is everything you ever need to know about making software applications or maybe even about life. A philosophical conversation for a different time.
Our personalities didn’t exactly match, but there was a baseline understanding of all the right ways to make software and all the wrong ways to make it. No sprints, no agile, no buzzwords… in all honesty, we don’t have a name for it… just the way we like to do it. Call it a meeting of common sense, divine intervention, or the fact this guy got me married to a local, that accelerated our intellectual partnership. We still laugh about those beginning times, almost 10 years later.
Naturally, as with most great engineering minds (gentle sarcasm), we decided to build a startup together. I won’t bore you with the details, but Adi and I created the technology for people to pay for things anonymously on the internet, using closed-loop retail gift cards. It was called GiftPay and it revolutionized the payments industry. (If you’re ever on a specific website and you see a “pay with gift cards” button, we invented that button.)
In 2018, we and our small engineering staff (many of whom are still with us today) sold GiftPay. It was a great feeling of accomplishment and sadness… mainly because we really enjoyed the engineering side of the product. Then we found ourselves pretty empty on what to do next.
And here we are, Axel. Adi’s and my second brainchild. A small group of software engineers, handpicked and managed by the two of us. We, together, like to think that we produce some of the best-architected, functional, modern-looking software on the planet. But I’ll let whoever reads this make that decision.
At any given time, I’m either in New York, Tampa, or Bishkek. Hit our "Contact Us" button and schedule a call with me to chat software.
-Phil
