Hello! I’m Ian, CTO at Tribute. 👋
It’s great to finally meet you. Tribute has been inspiring and modernizing the way employees engage with and learn from each other at work, securing early enterprise customers like Microsoft, Zillow, and Coinbase.
Our foothold in the mentorship space has opened exciting opportunities to disrupt the future of work. I am looking for you to join as one of the first 5 engineers, what I consider my founding engineering team, to seize this opportunity and create the future of work together. As my favorite proverb explains, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
After I sold my first startup to eBay, I knew I had to do it again. But I also knew there were important lessons to be learned working in a large organization.
It was there where I learned how great employees, especially engineers, make everyone around them successful. I learned how to build teams through a people-first mindset from my mentor.
I was drawn to Tribute because they cleverly packaged my same learnings into an enterprise product. Their bet on 30-day micro-mentorships integrated seamlessly into the flow of work had the power to transform how we engage with and learn from each other every day. This is better than traditional mentorship programs, run by spreadsheets, that are largely top-down and stagnate. I realized I had to join Tribute because their female-founded team shared the same values and ethos as me: where we bring our best selves to work when we’re given the space and grace to care for ourselves and our loved ones.
So why am I writing this letter to you?
The truth is I’m not going to find someone like you from keyword-searching for skills or reading through your resume. Instead, we will connect through our values, experiences, and stories. This is just our starting point, but here’s what I know for sure about you already.
- You are introspective. You tell a compelling story about what you learned about yourself in each chapter of your life and what drove you to take the next step.
- You are highly empathetic. When I speak with people you have worked with, they tell me how you’ve made them more successful by stepping into their shoes.
- You understand your craft. You recognize that it’s merely a tool that serves a higher purpose or a piece of art that you take pride in.
You also strongly identify with one of these areas:
- Frontend: You’re an ex-startup founder, or you’re aspiring to be one. Having been in a traditional mentorship and felt both the rewards yet stagnant nature of it, you’re excited to delight users with modern mentorship. You enjoy growth hacking across engineering, product, and business development.
- AI / NLP: You want to use AI for good and you’re probably tired of optimizing for addiction metrics. The heart of Tribute is matching a problem with a problem solver. You’re able to tap into group psychology to mature an algorithm over time and guide the product roadmap to draw out the data we need.
- Backend: You take pride in your work. You want code to be strongly typed and provably correct. You’re a security-savvy architect, thoughtful of SaaS architecture and tenant isolation. When there are multiple “right” answers, you systematically navigate us through the tradeoffs.
I can’t wait to talk with you and introduce you to Team Tribute. If you’re interested to learn more, connect with me on LinkedIn and email us at hello@tributementorship.com.
Together, we will create the future of work.
