Shawn is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Axle Payments, the “only integrated payments, collections, and financing solution for small freight brokers.” As a chief officer in a startup, Shawn’s role can change by the minute, from budgeting and hiring to developing the actual software platform.
Transcript
My name is Shawn Vo and I'm the CTO and co-founder of Axel Payments. So, our company is a financial technology platform that is specifically targeting the transportation industry. So we basically help transportation company get the working capital they need to basically move goods all around the world. So before this company specifically we were working in the logistics space, so we were doing a lot of stuff in the transportation space. We raised a couple of venture rounds from transportation investors and then we gradually learned that a lot of these companies have a lot of problems with working capital. So they are basically constraint from growing by how much money they have in the bank. So we decided that, hey we can build a software solution, pair it with this financial product that is able to solve a lot of their problems. SO, from my perspective I balance a lot of my time between working on the business, building the technology, managing engineers, hiring a bunch of people, making sure that customers are happy. So it's a lot of different things right now, but as we scale and as we grow-up I feel like my role is going to be more specific in terms of product and engineering. But since we are relatively small you kinda have to do everything. As a team we split a lot of responsibilities. The ones that I'm more focused on is basically making sure that the product works. Like we can build the technology and we're building new features that customers really want, things are reliable, we're sending money to the right bank accounts. You know, there's no errors in the system. I also manage a remote engineering team, it happens to be in Vietnam, that's a 12 hour difference. So my hours is probably pretty unusual, but for example, I'll normally have meetings starting from 7 a.m. or so, because it's like 7 p.m. their time. And then, some engineers actually prefer working at night so sometimes I'll stay up really late and have late meetings too. So it's pretty stretched out but I think the cool thing about managing my own scheduled is that I'll just take random gaps during the day if I need to. You know, I don't have a strict time, so I'll make sure I have time for lunch, have dinner with my girlfriend, do all that kinda stuff, and then probably continue working throughout the day.
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