Will Kessler
Product Leader
Email | LinkedIn
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30,000 foot view

I built Sydecar’s products from the ground up, beginning in April 2021.

Sydecar’s private-equity platform massively accelerates the fundraising process for deal sponsors, handling all legal, banking, tax filing, and investor communication needs. Instead of getting bogged down by details, sponsors can focus on building relationships, thanks to Sydecar’s super efficient, highly vetted and automated platform.

In 2023, Sydecar’s products realized $XXM ARR, with a large profit margin, and the company is on track to quintuple revenues in 2024.

Sydecar's Products

  • Sydecar’s Core web application has closed over a thousand strategic investments, moving nearly $XXB of capital from XX,000+ investors.
  • Its venture fund product, Fund+,  has attracted a large number of unique venture funds investing in hundreds of SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles).
  • In parallel, Sydecar’s fully enabled Enterprise API has been integrated headlessly by five corporate clients, along with a rapid on-boarding system enabled by Google Sheets.

Behind the scenes

My team built:

  1. A GAAP-compliant custom ledger system.

This custom ledger empowers the company to deliver tax returns and financial reports months ahead of any of our competitors

  1. We implemented a full-featured internal operations panel.

Thanks to the panel’s job assignment workflow system, as well as our extensive automation, Sydecar’s customer experience team reliably meets its extremely demanding customer SLA’s and growth in deal volume, despite being ten times smaller than our largest competitors’ teams.

Building the team

To ship all of these products, I hired and managed:

  • 15 fullstack developers
  • 2 PMs
  • 2 EMs
  • 1 devops engineer
  • 3 QA engineers

My “superpower” is my ability to guide teams to highly creative solutions to complex customer problems.  This grows from a deep discovery of the customer experience, followed by group ideating and hands-on prototyping, and finally, formulation of a clear execution plan. Continually listening to the team's needs during build is key, leading to a melding of "what the customer actually needs" with "what can we build that's just way better."

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I helped orchestrate the acquisition of CloudLabs by Udacity, and integrated its engineering team into Udacity’s organization. My team launched Udacity’s advanced Workspaces (in-browser virtual compute environments), as well as its new modern Content Management System “Mocha”.

Team: 12 engs, 2 PMs, 2 designers.

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I built the engineering team from zero to launch of Minted. Minted, now a series D unicorn, is an online creative community and store for holiday cards, wedding invitations, and luxury arts and decoration.

Team: 4 engineers, 1 QA, 1PM.

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Crunchbase is the world's leading database of startup information: companies, products, fundings, investors, entrepreneurs, and news.

I hired, coached and co-managed the team for four months to drive to the April 2014 CrunchBase relaunch with an entirely new codebase/design. After successful launch, we leveraged our graph-database technology in features like Graph Insights, Advanced Search, and the Investor Leaderboard.

These launches led to Crunchbase's spinoff from AOL into a venture-funded private company. _If you use Crunchbase today, you are probably using systems my team built.

Team: 9 engineers, 1 devops, 1 QA

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Will oversaw four product and engineering teams at PowerReviews, an online customer reviews service, through its acquisition by Bazaarvoice Inc, and transitioned the teams into Bazaarvoice.

Team: Four teams of 2-3 engineers, 1PM, 1QA each.

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At Udacity, I authored an open sourced tutoring tool, JupyterGraffiti. With this tool, instructors can record truly interactive audio and video instructional content, with live code and data that students can directly experiment in the video itself. Several universities have released hours of learning content with the tool.

Here’s some explanatory videos on the tool:

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