1. Tell us about Embrace’s origin story.  After many years at the prior company you founded, what inspired you to launch Embrace?

Embrace is built out of what my co-founder and I, and a bunch of investors in first generation mobile games and tools like MoPub and Testflight had seen firsthand. A mobile device, whether a phone, point of sale system, or appliance, represents a user and their experiences, behaviors, and pains. The existing vendors treated mobile like a website or server side application, even though it is compiled code run on disparate devices, in different countries, and through different carrier connections. While a ton of tools existed pitching mobile, no single tool had the end user as its index with every one of their session’s at its fingertips.  Instead my team hopscotched through product analytics, APMs, customer experience, logging, and crash reporting tools with no guarantee an issue would be found or the data would be collected and accessible to resolve. In other words, I had an extreme lack of tooling focused on the uniqueness and extreme potential of mobile.

Embrace was born to help all mobile teams, especially engineers, build the best experiences.

When starting Embrace, I believed that mobile would become more integrated into our daily lives, way beyond just games. Now, mobile experiences travel with us on our phones, wrists, cars, and devices. They shape the rhythms of how we work, live, and play as we weave them into our environments and processes. More than any other technology, mobile is transforming us by instantly and meaningfully integrating technology and people. Embrace allows developers to bring their boldest visions to life using the only platform created for building a better future.

2. You have a unique educational background:  Undergrad EE/CS degree plus a JD/MBA.  Which of those skills do you think helped you the most in your career as an entrepreneur?

All of them?  When starting a company, skills are required across product, engineering, fund raising, and legal. While many founding teams derive that value from different people, I am the ultimate jack of all trades.  With hands-on experience, I can accelerate different aspects of the company to quickly push through what would be blockers or slowdowns for other founders.

Although Fredric, my co-founder at Embrace, would argue that one degree I’m not allowed to use is coding.  That one I have to admit has atrophied although I may have submitted some website changes a long time ago and plan to do a PR to provide the team an unexpected laugh.

3. In what ways did the pandemic and all that followed impact Embrace?

For our business, the pandemic was a tailwind in the making and one we took advantage of. Mobile devices and apps were an increasingly integral part of everyone’s lives and Covid hastened this integration as the work from home movement happened overnight. Our customer base grew QoQ during the pandemic because mobile was a necessity for businesses with grocery store pick-ups to telehealth.

For our team, we adapted quickly to safe-guard our amazing culture we built over the years. We shifted  meetings, added virtual happy hours and donut buddies to the mix. The common-truths is that we as humans enjoy working with people with common values with opportunities for in-person contact. When it was safe to meet in person, we were excited to come back together because as humans, we cannot solely operate over Zoom (or Google Meet).

4. What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?

Go fast and break things. Making mistakes is the key to learning and achieving success. These mistakes mean you discovered something and, when the discovery is shared, everyone learns. Learnings compound week over week into growth. Making, openly discussing, and stopping mistakes is required to grow quickly. Only by growing and failing together do you achieve success.

Create a great culture. No opportunity cost is higher – it is always better to wait for the correct hire as opposed to stopping your search and then restarting it when that poor hire inevitably fails or, even worse, underperforms and lingers in your company. We are a kind team that encourages blunt feedback – this is the best environment for your entire team to grow and experiment.

5. Outside of functional skills, what do you look for in new hires for Embrace?

When we hire at Embrace, we evaluate culture fit and technical acumen separately. Whenever companies mix the two together, they inevitably bias to technical over culture. Culture fit is so much more important! We will hire a partial thumbs up on technical with a full thumbs up on Culture every day of the week. But we must never hire a candidate with a partial thumbs up on Culture. We interview culture based on our culture tenets of: Perspective – we seek to understand your perspective, Investing – meaningful insights are found by investing time, Honesty – brutal honesty delivered kindly, Simplest – Simplest solutions are identified by focusing on outcomes, Ownership – Growth is achievable only by empowering with ownership, and Dark Humor – finding joy and humor in any situation.

6. How have your early investors like AV8 been the most helpful to you?

When I look to lead a round of funding, I look for a partner. By “partner”, I mean a person who understands their role in starting and growing a company, and is also empathetic to the founder.  The alignment does not exist when startup founders often lose focus on activities that do not drive true business value.

I have been fortunate to be in a position at each round of funding to be selective of my VC partners. Hadley Harris at Eniac, Baris Aksoy at AV8, and Aaron Jacobson at NEA are three partners that I’m glad to have on the Embrace journey.  Specific to Baris, as a recent operator he really understands my day-to-day and how not to step in directly but instead to lend a healthy ear or provide external driven insights on the market and category dynamics.  I am lucky to now consider Baris a friend even beyond Embrace.

7. What are your daily routines and how do you allocate your time? Walk me through a typical workday for you.

I try my best to workout every morning but life takes over a lot of the time, this is something I am actively working to get better towards. Eating healthy with morning smoothies and a salad + protein at lunch keeps my energy levels up during the day. I’ll reserve a night in the office once a week to get into my flow state and be able to think creatively on vision and larger projects.

8. What have you read recently or watched (TV, movies, etc) that you can’t stop recommending to others?

A few weeks ago as traffic picked up in LA, I started to listen to podcasts – sometimes with my kids.  The primary two are

• Stuff You Should Know is my 10 year old and my favorite. Covering topics that we have all wondered about but never taken enough brainspace to truly research. With a whimsical and nerdy approach, the hosts tackle these topics with enough depth to hold your attention and teach you something. Think Loch Ness Monster, the effect of picking your nose, and the history behind the Delorean
• All In is a cliche one to choose as its hosted by 4 prominently known VCs. Even so, I listen to it for perspective both in terms of VCs vs founders, for which I dont always align, and outside of the venture world.  Their takes on the Ukraine-Russia war are particularly enlightening and have changed my perspective on the world.