Gene Conroy-Jones

I've always had a keen interest in building software. At Christmas 1982, I received an Atari 400 and a tape deck. Armed with a monthly issue of Computer & Video Games, my parents and I would type in the games using the archaic flat keyboard and save them to tape. The first game we entered was SSSnakes, a Tron Light Cycle game, a pattern we repeated over many months and years: pair programming, one reading, the other typing the game, learning to code and debug. My thirst to create was born. Without the internet, I began a search for books on how to code, and within a year I was programming my own games on my Atari 400.

This love of learning has always been with me and naturally drew me toward science and technology, and also business. My immediate and extended family has always been entrepreneurial; growing a business is close to my heart, and knowing the time and effort people put into making a business succeed is deeply meaningful. Like programming, growing something from nothing is deeply rewarding. I spent many days at my dad's haulage firm and in the cab, learning from the sidelines.

Evergage was a marketing tech platform, think Pendo or Amplitude before they existed: a real-time analytics and personalization system. The product was acquired by Salesforce and became core to their Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• Prototype to MVP: Led the UI re-architecture, transforming a rough prototype into pixel-perfect designs to help capture early-stage customers, built in full-stack Java.
• Segmentation: Built rule-engine to allow user segmentation for personalized campaigns. Integrated into real-time data processing pipeline.
• A/B Testing: Developed an A/B testing feature to test marketing campaigns with your audience. Created campaign module and analytics.

Growth: Successful shift from a Microsoft to an open-source stack, with full-stack Java using Google Web Toolkit on the front end, then a move to Angular on my advice when GWT stalled. Learned how to iteratively deliver fully working features focused on customer outcomes.

Switchboard Software is the data operations platform putting the power of Big Data in the hands of enterprise users for revenue optimization and AI data foundations. The platform is built by people who had launched BigQuery at Google.

• Prototype to MVP: Led two key migrations from prototype to production within the first three months, followed by an iterative migration from Angular to React with zero customer disruption.
• 50 Data Connectors: Delivered over 50 data API connectors to extract and normalize data from Ad Tech platforms used by The Guardian, New York Times, Pinterest and Spotify teams.
• Email Ingestion: Built an AWS serverless event-driven email document ingestion feature to onboard a new customer.
• Automated Testing & CI/CD: A small team of under 10 was responsible for key real-time revenue data for these publishers. With excellent contributions to automated testing, manual QA was not required and we released iteratively and quickly.

Growth: This experience honed my skills in data engineering and in building strong, modern CI/CD and data foundations.

DADO was the Google Search for your construction docs. Connect your data sources and we ingest your PDFs, split them up, OCR, image scan and version them, giving you a searchable library of related documents.

• Cloud Sync: After our third-party document sync library was acquired and shut down, we built an in-house version on tight deadlines, hooking into construction and tech document stores. Without it our product would have been next to useless. Through many late nights we replaced it, retaining essential customers.
• Plans-to-Spreadsheet Engine: Built a templating engine which converted construction plans into spreadsheet-style views. Using OCR and smart areas, we provided a definitive data view of your construction docs. It required an intuitive UI/UX and back-end processing, and was a key feature to address customer pain and make document search definitive.
• GraphDB: Architected and built a performant document graph on AWS Neptune, with Athena for analytics, linking related construction documents and cutting processing for the largest customers from an hour to under 10 seconds, supporting high-throughput production systems.
• Technical Lead: Hired to add technical seniority to the team, I was instrumental in many key features, eventually leading engineering and ushering the company through acquisition. Managed 18 engineers across three products, planning features with product using the Shape Up methodology.

Growth: Strong player-coach territory: coding daily, shaping process and mentoring teams. Super rewarding to build great features with the team.

OurHive is a Smart Home Inventory App. Take a picture or scan a box barcode, and the app auto-organizes your household items, appliances and key documents and enriches them with useful info.

• AI RAG Pipeline Architecture: Built a performant Applied AI RAG data pipeline using AWS managed services for vision, labeling, text extraction and transcription. Data used to identify physical home assets from user photos and barcodes, automatically querying and fetching relevant technical documentation. A good use of AI to solve real problems for homeowners.
• Prototype to MVP: Validated the tech early with a barebones MVP to establish project feasibility.
• Founding CTO: Built a multidisciplinary team from scratch in the US and Ukraine.
• AWS Cloud Architect: Built a serverless backend on AWS, using a GraphQL layer and single-table design principles on DynamoDB. Automated the iOS app pipeline from development through testing.

Growth: First real 0-to-1 play in validating an idea and growing a team. First Applied AI role to solve real product issues.

Stratus is an ERP platform for managing logistics in prefab construction, handling everything post-design: tracking how items get built, through the factory floor, to installation on site.

• Series B Funding: Joined pre-Series B ($35M) to help transform engineering culture, process, and architecture for an industry-leading construction tech platform. Successfully navigated investor diligence to secure growth.
• AI-first innovation culture: Drove transformation across product and engineering through experimentation, champion weeks, innovation days, training, lunch 'n' learns, and show 'n' tells. 80% of engineers using AI daily. Led by example prototyping use cases.
• Data-Driven: Diagnosed engineering health across people, process, and architecture using DORA-style metrics and quarterly developer experience surveys. Replaced gut-feel with data tracked weekly. Guided by Accelerate and DX frameworks, increased PR throughput by 35% year-over-year.
• Technical Leadership: Led modernization efforts toward twelve-factor principles, infrastructure as code, scaling, cost optimization and observability. The team was able to scale the platform while reducing costs by 25% and improving reliability.
• Team Growth: Scaled hiring across the US and LATAM and organized teams into autonomous pods, strengthening engineering leadership through blameless postmortems, egoless decision-making, team charters, and focused product planning. Autonomy allowed several teams to introduce features at the annual conference key to the CEO's growth strategy.

Growth: Personally a tremendous period of growth, and deeply satisfying to help modernize a team and shepherd them through the agentic revolution. The engineering team grew from around 20 to over 45 with revenue doubling year on year.

Applied AI Builder: The last six months I have been coding daily building tools and harnesses to discover the future AIDLC.

• Hands-on R&D focused on multi-agent orchestration, investigating OpenClaw, Hermes, PaperClip and Gas City to identify a winning AI-native SDLC.
• Built a production-grade SaaS Forms App (think Jotform) in 4 weeks with the agentic harness. I estimate a team of five would have taken a year to build this pre-AI.
• Built high-performance tooling in Go and Rust to manage skills, DevEx and agentic workflows, ensuring deterministic behavior when running the SDLC.

Growth: Discovering the signal on the future of software engineering was an important goal. I have always focused on adding value at every step, and the productivity and opportunity in Applied AI make me excited for the future.

Why is your blog called Four Signals? Most challenges in modern technology come down to four key areas: People, Process, Architecture and Measure. Viewing how people work together as features move through the SDLC, examining the cost of change, talking one-to-one and using metrics will give you objective results to modernize any forward-thinking company. I have an open-minded, egoless attitude and work with curiosity. The objective answers are out there; you need to measure your team to find them and answer your most pressing issues. The book Accelerate defines better than I could what modern tech company excellence looks like. Strongly recommend, along with The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project.

Where is the Seventh Startup? I only count six - where is the seventh? I have worked with many startups. I love talking tech, hearing about the challenges and successes. The seventh startup is my placeholder for all those ambitious builders I have been lucky enough to work with.