Leading a startup’s engineering team
EXPANSO
Expanso is the commercial offering behind Bacalhau, a platform for fast, cost efficient, and secure computation that enables users to run ML and AI training and inference jobs where the data is generated and stored.
After incubation of the Bacalhau project at research and development organisation Protocol Labs, in 2022 Expanso successfully executed a spin-out of the project team into a separate company to pursue a new commercial offering.
The challenge
As part of their vision for developing a commercial product on top of Bacalhau, Expanso wanted to target new customer segments in addition to Protocol Labs’ existing customer base in the Web 3 space. The engineering team’s contribution to this mission was to pivot the technology to accommodate all the needs of users with more traditional IT enterprises.
Expanso needed leadership of their engineering team to provide focus, direction and purpose to this effort. They also needed senior technology leadership to help navigate becoming an independent organisation that had to secure its own funding, by helping set the vision, define user requirements and produce compelling demonstrations of the product’s capabilities and potential that could be shown to potential investors.
What we did
Register Dynamics supplied a senior executive-level technologist to work alongside Expanso’s CEO and CTO who lead the engineering team of 6-8 junior and senior staff. They also set the engineering roadmap, integrating feedback from users and C-Suite executives to build out a compelling plan that enabled regular marketing activity around newly released features whilst taking the product towards technical goals.
We also flexibly supplied a number of senior engineers to the development team, scaling up and down as demand required. They worked on extending the decentralised data infrastructure at the very core of Bacalhau, developed new features in direct response to user demand, and ensured Bacalhau production operations ran smoothly and efficiently.
Our executive-level technologist presented the product at summits and webinars, building interest and momentum around the product, and ensured that engineering output resulted in demoable material.
They also provided line management and pastoral care to staff, helping them to be happy and productive, and acted as trusted mentor to junior staff, providing advice on navigating their first engineering team.
The result
The team took the new product developed for the cutting-edge Web 3 space and successfully transitioned the product, culminating in our successful testing and release of Bacalhau 1.0. Building on our work, Expanso have continued to invest in Bacalhau and a number of new releases have since been made with features on top of the core technology that we helped to pioneer.
Our efforts helped Expanso secure a multi-million USD venture capital investment and Expanso has since won a number of awards from top-tier technology partners including Intel and Samsung.
Tags: