Daniel O'Shea

My first job with computers was in high school. I was part of a team of students that had been recently trained by the Santa Cruz County Office of Education in web design. We built the first website for our high school and were feeling very accomplished until we tried to post updates to our site only to watch them fail. The SCCOE had a few different people take a look but they were not able to solve the issue. One day the head of technology was visiting our school and offered to take a look, I was in the library¹ watching the debugging process with curiosity because I had never worked with a unix system before, as I watched over his shoulder at some point I made a comment could this be a permission issue, did we use the same account for the initial upload that we were trying to update the site with? He turned around looked at me, back to the computer, typed some commands, back at me and asked “What are you doing this summer?” I had passed my first technical interview, I was too young for the SCCOE to hire me as a student so we waited a year and from sophomore year to graduation I worked first in the lab teaching teachers how to use technology, to becoming a jr unix sys admin², to writing my first software used by other people. The position also helped me discover computer engineering which would become my major at the University of California San Diego.

College Years

After three and a half years I was looking for something new, and right before thanksgiving a friend from Google gave me a call about a company he wanted to start to do online appointment booking for doctors visits (this was in 2006). I quit my job, packed up and moved into an apartment in Berkeley and joined my first startup, I was now a real entrepreneur and I was hooked on startups.

That first startup did not ultimately work out for me, but it lead me to another company Sparkart that was a digital agency building websites and web applications for entertainment brands. One of the artists I worked with was Bon Jovi, and at the time we signed the contract they told me that in all the years the band had a web presence no vendor, not even the big ticketing sites had been able to withstand the traffic caused by the announcement of a global tour. They called this phenomena the Bon Jovi Tsunami. For context this was back in the days before AWS, when you had to sign lease agreements to buy servers and pay people to rack and stack them for you, lead time and capacity planning were critical.

I took this as a challenge, I wanted my team³ to be the first to conquer the tsunami. So we dug in, understand what parts of our stack would be bottlenecks, did our capacity planning, got that lease with Dell signed, got deliveries of new hardware, coordinated with ops to get everything online and installed, launched the site and then came the announcement of the world tour. We survived becoming their first vendor to do so!

The Startup Life

Humin eventually was acquired by Tinder, we had built people discovery technology that they wanted, and after demoing it to the CEO, he couldn’t believe that we were able to make it work. He accused me of faking the demo, he sent an associate out to buy a brand new phone, download our app from the store and see if it still worked. I didn’t need to fake anything, our technology worked and when the associate came back, and the application performed as it did in the demo, the deal was sealed.

With the acquisition closed I sought something new, I found my way to BlueOwl and became employee number two. I helped build the engineering team, launch a behavioral auto insurance product and launch an insurance company in 18 months⁴. What started as a backend engineering individual contributor role, became backend lead after two weeks, director of engineering after two months, and VP of engineering just after two years. Now I am responsible for the technology that powers the HiRoad Assurance company and the engineering organization at BlueOwl where I help enable teams across:

• Front End
• iOS
• Android
• Backend
• Data Engineering
• QA
• Security & Privacy
• Platform & Reliability
• IT Operations

I’ve worked all over the technology stack from the operating system to enterprise applications to browser and mobile. I’ve been an individual contributor, technical lead, leader of people and leader of leaders. From writing a patch for an operating system, mobile application development (cross platform things in C, to Swift, to Kotlin), distributed systems and data pipelines, javascript for global superstar recording artists and clients like Microsoft, to a cloud based platform of services in one of the most regulated and security conscience environments in the US.

My passion is pursuing bold ideas, building disruptive technology, and recruiting/ mentoring/ growing stellar engineering teams.

Photo Credit

• Title - Me
• UCSD Geisel Library - Photo by MILAN KOVACEVIC
• Computer - Photo by Clément H on Unsplash
• Startup - Photo by Startaê Team on Unsplash