I work with pre-seed/seed stage startups to build, grow, and scale their products, teams, and processes.
I'm outcome focused and get deeply embedded within your team to provide hands-on engineering power and ongoing strategic support.
I'll bring over a decade of product, engineering, and leadership experience at early stage startups to your team.
I work with up to three pre-seed/seed stage startups at a time on a month to month basis. Why only three? Because I know the demands and expectations at pre-seed and seed stage startups and I want to deeply engage with each company without tight time constraints.
Here's what you can expect:
Daily → I'll join your Slack or Discord to be regularly available for you and your engineering team to discuss technical design, product/engineering roadmap, help manage success of feature launches, and provide general day to day leadership support.
Weekly → Outside of async communication, I make myself available for up to 2 hours of weekly higher level strategy planning calls with you and your leadership team. This is a great time to discuss overall product strategy, go-to-market activities, growth and marketing, hiring, fundraising, etc.
Monthly → I provide up to 20 hours of hands-on engineering power per month to help you build new MVPs/features and scale existing ones, scale or refactor your infrastructure, hire and onboard new engineers, and generally provide my time as a resource. Our goal for this time should be to maximize my ROI for your company.
My career has largely been defined by my ability to work independently across a vast breadth of the tech stack and business - a skill set particularly useful at pre-seed and seed stage startups where resources are limited and speed is key.
During the 2021 NFT bull-run, my co-founder and I saw an opportunity to bring a new level of analytics and insights to the NFT trading space. After going from idea to MVP is under 4 weeks, icy.tools began to gain fast traction through our product-led growth and social media marketing efforts.
Over the next 6 months, we scaled the platform to 7 figure ARR and millions of users - going through all the steps of scaling a startup in 6 compressed months. This included continued product iteration and growth, hiring to grow the team to 10+, scaling infrastructure and indexing efforts, receiving a term-sheet from fundraising, and ultimately getting acquired by QuickNode.
After acquisition, I led the development of indexing and analytics efforts at icy.tools and QuickNode. While continuing to build out full-stack features and APIs, I was actively managing and scaling reliable jobs/queues infrastructure, scaling Postgres to TBs of data and billions of rows, and deploying and managing infrastructure across AWS and Kubernetes.
Tech stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker
In 2023, I left QuickNode to go back to being a founder. Shortly after, I acquired Pally.gg - a no-code app built on Bubble to that allows creators to split tips with their teams.
Over the first 3 months, I did a ground-up rewrite of the entire product. This included the migration from Bubble's proprietary data storage to a Postgres database, reliably migrating hundreds of thousands of dollars of payments records, writing robust infrastructure to handle traceable payouts to creators, and building out all other frontend and backend needs.
In addition to the engineering involved, I manage all operations, customer success, and growth efforts of Pally.gg.
Tech stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, PostgreSQL, AWS (Serverless), SST
You are a pre-seed or seed, growth stage startup with 6+ months of runway.
You have existing engineering resources, possibly even a technical co-founder, but want more fire-power - I work best as an extension of your team, not a replacement.
Your stack has significant overlap with my expertise above - this ensures I can provide the most value to your company. But I thrive in the early stage environments where you need to be diverse.
I'm currently unavailable. But you can email me at blake [at] blakeowens [dot] com to discuss future opportunities!
Blake's brilliance as an engineer became evident when we co-founded icy.tools together. His remarkable problem-solving capabilities, swift execution and experience helped us scale quickly while growing the underlying business. His work is characterized by high-quality delivered in record time, setting him apart from most folks I've had the pleasure of working with. Beyond his engineering prowess, Blake's expertise spans design, product, and growth, enabling him to approach problems from a comprehensive perspective. This blend of technical skill and broad understanding significantly enhances the impact of any project he works on.
As a "coach", Blake is nothing short of inspiring. He has an inherent ability to share his knowledge in a way that is both engaging and impactful, fostering growth and learning in those around him. My own professional development has greatly benefited from his mentorship and coaching throughout the years. Blake's exceptional blend of technical proficiency, wide-ranging experience, and mentoring abilities makes him an invaluable asset to any team.
- Jose Casanova, co-founder at icy.tools
I haven't met many engineers like Blake in my career. He displays an uncanny ability to materialize a powerful and capable code base from a high level product vision. Oftentimes when working on a project with him I found myself just sitting back and observing as he weaved together the different components necessary to bring vision into reality. He has a rare talent for being able to switch between the 10,000ft view and being in the weeds. And on top of being such an amazing engineer he is also a teammate through and through. He constantly wants to see those around, below, and above him succeed. I look forward to every opportunity I have to work by his side.
- Taylor Beever, Staff Data Engineer at QuickNode and icy.tools founding engineer