Hi! My name is Jake Murzy. I am based in San Francisco but I frequently travel on the East Coast and around the globe.
I spent 15 years of my career as a multidisciplinary tech entrepreneur building and leading tech startups. I have an inner drive — obsession is probably the right word — to learn, to reach higher, and to be better. My most impactful learnings emerged from my failed experiments.
I like twisting problems around in my head until I come up with a solution. This usually follows a rabbit-hole styled personalized learning, and I believe, is the reason my early quest has taken an inevitable turn toward a general interest in technology and startups.
I picked up coding at a young age. What started as curiosity about computers, quickly turned into a passion. In software, to abstract a problem correctly, you must approach it from first principles. This allows you to remove your existing biases and preconceived notions so that you can reduce the number of failed observations to produce a robust solution. As it turns out, this is also amenable to other distinct aspects of building a startup, from ideation to shipping to scaling.
I’m a huge proponent of functional programming paradigms and reactive design patterns and take a pragmatic approach to understand the flow of data.
That being said, at one point in my life, coding was an exercise I truly couldn’t do without. But over the years I’ve come to realize that a thick portion of my time was best spent empowering my team and asking them probing questions to stimulate their efficiency and productivity.
I do, however, try to contribute to open-source and write occasional posts[1][2], and actively write and do code reviews at my startup.
I am currently working on Committer. Committer is building financial products for software teams. Our mission is to free smart people to focus on what matters. I am looking to bring on a technical and a business cofounder to our team. So if you know anyone who'd be a good fit, please let me know.
I like creating great products with great people. I am very passionate about transforming ideas from paper and the mind into strategically sound functional products. As a stakeholder, I take frequent pauses throughout the day to reflect on my actions to stay resourceful and steer clear of roadblocks. As with most other things, small steps upwards make a compound difference in how great products are built.
I'm not by any means a designer by trade, but I have always had a good eye for gratifying design and detail, and a passion for creating high fidelity mockups. I also consume more design content than I probably should have and my work is inspired by and shamelessly borrow elements from creatives that share their artistic process.
I often try to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time. So most of the noise I put into writing reads like academic-speak. This does not mean I’m confused. It just means I have a divergence, hopefully temporary, in my mind map and I’m on a discovery path to reach a stronger node with a sounder argument.
I love mentoring others in their own journey towards self discovery and I am always seeking out opportunities to adopt new mentors for my own personal learning—which is the best way to cut your time to success by a competitively substantial amount. I tend to overcommunicate the obvious as I found that it is one trait shared by most great mentors.
I occasionally invest in startups where I believe the business has the potential to become a category king. I'm expecting to do 1-3 small check investments (seed and pre-seed deals) this year.
Outside of work, I spent a big slice of my time dreaming about a lengthy getaway to my favorite island Ko Yao Yai and planning trips to other remote places to partake in new cultural experiences.
I enjoy all outdoor activities but there’s nothing like finishing a tough work week, then gliding over hard-packed snow and feeling the stress melt away. I normally snowboard but this year started skiing too. Very recently, my winter withdrawals also reignited my interest in surfing to help with the imbalance.
I'm married to the fabulously adorable Julia Murzy. She is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Aside from all the “chores”, traveling and shredding we do together, Julia and I try to work on side projects in the time remaining when her schedule is at peace with mine. Our latest two projects are NDAify and Slope Ninja.
You know, before I let you go, I can't write about myself and not mention how much I love JavaScript. Friends don’t let friends use [insert your lanuage of choice that isn’t JavaScript]. All jokes aside, you should use JavaScript. There's this great talk from 2014 (9 years old and still relevant) titled The Birth & Death of JavaScript that you ought to watch before trying to convince me to use your language of choice that doesn't at least emit JavaScript. Emphasis being on "emit", TypeScript is alright, lame but alright. Especially, if you can decouple yourself from the TypeScript community full of transplants with background in object-oriented languages. Just take the TypeScript community with a grain of salt and you'll do just great.
Fin.