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The awe.sm team is proud to welcome Jonathan Cowperthwait. He goes by many names, but we prefer to call him JEC (rhymes with “heck”, E is for Edward) since our CEO goes by Jonathan and “Jonathan2” would have been demeaning.

JEC actually joined the team in January 2011, but we are a lean startup, and lean startups only do welcome posts when they have enough information for a proper welcome. We have finally amassed enough to write his documentation.

—BSH

  
JEC(1)                   awe.sm General Manual                 JEC(1)
  
  
NAME
	JEC which stands for Jonathan E. Cowperthwait
	also known as Cowp, @cowperthwait, http://cowp.co

SYNOPSIS
	JEC -- "Hi"

DESCRIPTION
	Marketing guy at awe.sm
	Provider of witty content and all things creative

OPTIONS
	-redbull    verbose mode
	-ALL        always on, all the time

EXAMPLES
	JEC webinar
	JEC blog
		Blog posts explaining technology in simple terms
	JEC press
		Great press coverage for new releases
	JEC marketing
		A marketing website to explain awe.sm’s functionality
	JEC customer-support
	JEC design
		Creating t-shirts with hilarious tag lines

ENVIRONMENT
	Ideal in the Bay Area
	Surrounded by great food and interesting people
	After dark best suited with a Jameson and a pickleback

COMPATIBILITY
	Amazing utility that gets along with everyone
	Prefers the comfort of men, but has long indulged women

SEE ALSO
	skydiving, marathon running, filmmaking, Instagram, shuffleboard

STANDARDS
	fancy clothes
	Teutonic cars
	bland food

HISTORY
	Created and raised in the Bay Area.
	JEC cultured himself at The University of Chicago.
	Started his career in the Chicago advertising industry, but returned
	  home to the Bay when it snowed on Easter.
	Found awe.sm through Laurie, who was in need of a utility to add to the
	  awe.sm toolbox

KNOWN BUGS
	Stunner glasses

 

Interested in joining the awe.sm team? Join the fastest-growing team in the whole world.^{[Citation needed]} Check out our jobs page!

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Bennett Hiles grew up in Los Angeles only blocks from awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss, but their paths didn’t cross until Bennett responded to a job post on TechCrunch in 2010 that went a little something like this:

Wanted, the Most Interesting Programmer in the World:

• Someone who doesn’t need to use pointers; his* code just knows where to look.
• Someone who doesn’t call APIs, they call him*.
• Someone who once wrote a slow query, just to see how it felt.

*awe.sm is an equal opportunity employer, but gender-neutral pronouns make things less funny.

After getting a taste of web analytics at a previous job, Bennett felt ready to conquer the big data challenges at awe.sm. And he impressed us by being only the second candidate to pass Laurie‘s infamous whiteboard interview. Since joining in August (hey, we’ve been busy!), Bennett has been responsible for ensuring the massive amounts of data we collect get turned into speedy and reliable results for our customers. He’s done a phenomenal job so far, and his love of Mexican food ensures we do team lunch at Taqueria Cancun at least once a week (taco Wednesdays, duh!).

Outside of work, Bennett is a man of many interests. He enjoys roller and ice hockey. Though he speaks better Java than Spanish, he’s spent every Christmas waterskiing and wakeboarding in Mexico with his family. He rescues cats. He knows how to set the mood with his playlists on Rdio. And he loves a great whiskey.

Gentlemen, and especially ladies, please welcome Bennett Hiles to team awe.sm.

P.S. If you think you’re qualified to be the 2nd Most Interesting Programmer in the World , we’re still hiring!

[Photo: @photo]

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This is a bit belated, but I’m very pleased to officially announce that Laurie Voss (@seldo) has joined the Snowball team as our technical lead.

I first met Laurie when we hired him to join the Yahoo! Widgets team in early 2007. While I’m not sure he always felt the same way, I liked Laurie from the start: he’s extremely intelligent and hard-working, yet he’d be the last person to acknowledge either. And most importantly to me, he loves what he does and takes great pride in it. I know that if I can convince Laurie to get excited about something, it’s a genuinely good idea.

When I decided to start down this road, Laurie was my first choice as technical co-founder. I remember taking him to dinner and telling him the idea and being greatly relieved when he thought I might be on to something . Unfortunately, U.S. immigration law prohibited Laurie, a UK citizen who was at the time on an L-1 visa with Yahoo!, from joining right away. So, after going it alone (with much help from our friends at Cloudspace) for over a year and more hoop-jumping than I care to think about right now, I can’t express how pleased I am to finally be working side-by-side with the partner I wanted.

Laurie brings to the team the technical expertise to turn our early efforts into scalable platforms, the passion for the web to help us deliver truly compelling products, and the patience to deal with me . We’re both very excited about what we’re building and how we think it will be valuable to others.

You can read Laurie’s much more eloquent account of how we got here and where we’re going on his blog. And if you find the challenges we faced in teaming up as ridiculous as we do, please support the Startup Visa movement (Laurie will be blogging a fuller account of his immigration odyssey just as soon as we ship a couple new things ). Finally, we’re also looking for a kick-ass Back-End Engineer to join our growing team. So, please spread the word.