Software at Scale 50 - Redefining Labor with Akshay Buddiga

Akshay Buddiga is the co-founder and CTO of Traba, a labor management platform.

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Sorry for the long hiatus in episodes!

Today’s episode covers a myriad of interesting topics - from being the star of one of the internet’s first viral videos, to experiencing the hyper-growth at the somewhat controversial Zenefits, scaling out the technology platform at Fanatics, starting a company, picking an accelerator, only permitting in-person work, facilitating career growth of gig workers, and more!

Highlights

[0:00] - The infamous Spelling Bee incident.

[06:30] - Why pivot to Computer Science after an undergraduate focus in biomedical engineering?

[09:30] - Going to Stanford for Management Science and getting an education in Computer Science.

[13:00] - Zenefits during hyper-growth. Learning from Parker Conrad.

[18:30] - Building an e-commerce platform with reasonably high scale (powering all NFL gear) as a first software engineering gig. Dealing with lots of constraints from the beginning - like multi-currency support - and delivering a complete solution over several years.

The interesting seasonality - like Game 7 of the NBA finals - and the implications on the software engineers maintaining e-commerce systems. Watching all the super-bowls with coworkers.

[26:00] - A large outage, obviously due to DNS routing.

[31:00] - Why start a company?

[37:30] - Why join OnDeck?

[41:00] - Contrary to the current trend, Traba only allows in-person work. Why is that?

We go on to talk about the implications of remote work and other decisions in an early startup’s product velocity.

[57:00] - On being competitive.

[58:30] - Velocity is really about not working on the incorrect stuff.

[68:00] - What’s next for Traba? What’s the vision?

[72:30] - Building two-sided marketplaces, and the career path for gig workers.