Doug Sellers isn't afraid of a new challenge.
AssetAvenue, a Westwood-based online lender for real estate investment properties, is approaching their two year anniversary — a crucial time for a young business. Amidst a growing platform and a new CEO, Sellers has been guiding the company's technological future as CTO since he assumed the position in September.
Sellers could appropriately be titled a veteran CTO. Prior to AssetAvenue, Sellers was the Chief Technology Officer at Kumu Wellness, Redline.cc (where he was also a cofounder), and GOOD Worldwide. He has experience navigating the occasionally-tumultuous waters of the startup ecosystem and has years of experience developing teams that thrive in high-pressure environments. We sat down with Douglas to learn about what the future has in store for AssetAvenue.
What technologies power your business?
Right now we are powered by combination of Ember JS, Sinatra/Ruby, Salesforce and a host of AWS services with a bit of R sprinkled in.
What technologies are playing the biggest roles in AssetAvenue this year?
Internally we’re using Salesforce for our back office automation, which includes underwriting and servicing loans. On the consumer facing side Ember JS is playing a large role in our continued development as a business. It really allows us to rapidly build high quality user experiences.
What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?
We’re always looking to improve the user experience and the design of the site, especially in such a data heavy industry like the mortgages industry. UX plays a big role and we’re always doing large projects to improve the user experience. We also have a number of automation projects where we’re looking to streamline and simplify human-driven processes.
What are the biggest technology challenges you've faced in the past? How did you overcome them?
The biggest technology problem that I’ve, repeatedly, faced as a startup CTO is managing system complexity. Knowing how to start with the simplest possible situation with very simple technology and when to start to layer additional complexity into the system as the business model becomes more understood. The specific technologies come and go but the managing complexity issue is one of the main skills that a startup CTO has to have.
What are lessons you've learned about working in LA that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
There will always be more demand than supply when it comes to engineers and the demand and supply ratio is more out of balance here than in the Bay Area. In LA, you really have to be always recruiting and always coming up with innovative ways to hire, train and retain engineers. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that there is so much demand for senior engineers that the vast majority of good ones are employed and your chances of hiring one of them off a job posting are basically nil. Most of the hirable talent in the engineering market right now exists in the junior engineer segment. Hungry junior developers looking for good professional development and career growth can be your amazing senior software engineers a few years from now.
How will LA specifically continue to strengthen its tech community in 2015?
The biggest thing LA can do in the future is to keep local graduates at home. Too many of our talented engineers from Cal Tech, UCLA and USC leave the area to go to the Bay area to search for jobs.
Los Angeles is known for having a large talent pool of thirsty, young workers. What are the top characteristics you look for in a potential hire?
I always look for team fit when I’m hiring. I’m looking for someone who will complement my team and bring something different to the team while maintaining strong team cohesion. Team fit, to me, is more important than technical skill sets. These characteristics include being multi-talented, emotionally resilient, flexible and friendly.
How would your team describe working with you?
I think my team would say that I empower them to do amazing work by making sure that everyone understands what their roles and responsibilities are and expecting them to meet or exceed their own standards.
What trends do you see happening in real estate tech over the next three years? How is AssetAvenue anticipating those trends and working towards them?
The big trend in real estate tech will be increased reliance on machine learning techniques to automate complex portions of the process (e.g. underwriting, risk evaluation, investor and borrower matching).
What else do you want the LA startup community to know about AssetAvenue.
We’re one of a few players in a very high growth space and the upside of the Fintech start-ups, in general, is IPOs in the billions. The technology trend at AssetAvenue is toward developing interesting and complex systems that are disrupting an established industry, such as real estate mortgages, beyond just having a polished user experience.
