The average American spends 8.9 hours at work. Whew! That’s more than a third of your day! So if you’re going to invest so much of your life working towards something we believe you had better enjoy the people with whom you work.
As a growing startup, we’re excited to announce that we’re hiring software engineers! We’re looking for developers who know their stuff, care about small business and love solving tough problems. That’s who we are and how we work. And to help you get to know us a little better, we wanted to share more about each person who works to make Pure Chat awesome for our customers. Learn more about our incredible startup team below.
Chad
Chad is an outdoorsman who loves camping, fishing with his buddies (he just brought home 120 lbs. of salmon!), and hanging with his dog. He is happiest outside because it’s the best place to connect with good friends and disconnect from time-wasting activities like social media. Recently, Chad’s been cooking more often and his pulled pork tacos were the favorite at our Thanksgiving potluck!
Although Chad is one of our finest software developers, he actually went to school for aerospace engineering. It wasn’t until he had to do computer work for a class that he saw the beauty of building stuff by yourself and instant gratification of software creation. Chad joined Pure Chat in its first two weeks of existence and has stuck around because of the awesome people!
Dustin
Dustin is a creator. He loves building something out of nothing and expressing a concept or idea in the form of art. Two of his art forms are writing and painting – he’s had his personal blog for 13 years and recently did a piece using spray paint and acrylic on canvas. Create great art, he does. Yes, hmmm.
One of the other ways he expresses his creativity is through programming. Right now he’s even challenging himself by learning a new language! Dustin loves working with our small team at Pure Chat because he has the chance to own his projects, use a fresh tech stack, and contribute to the product’s direction. He sums it up with, “I’m too old to spend time with shitty people on shitty projects.” He wants to do honest work with awesome people. Amen, Dustin – we couldn’t agree more.
Terrence
Terrence is the humble producer of confreaksandgeeks.com and the CFG podcast; all about comic book news. To get new interviews and write-ups, his team attends all the comic conventions for networking and press talks. As a podcast and video producer, he keeps busy editing podcasts and YouTube videos, which means he doesn’t have time to run video game tournaments any longer. Even so, he still dreams of owning a game center that marries socializing, drinks and video games.
Terrence is Pure Chat’s dedicated mobile developer and he’s been hard at work fixing a lot of bugs so he can see even more 5-star ratings on the iOS app after the latest update. Terrence recently shocked the company by performing a karaoke rendition of Clint Eastwood by The Gorillaz at the holiday party.
Kristin
Kristin is a true artist. Over the last eight years her passion for art has lead her to experiment with woodworking, blacksmithing, jewelry metalworking, charcoal, painting and illustration. In college she used this broad range of skills to design notoriously spooky pieces like a spider web grill cover, miniature coffins, medieval stocks, and a haunted doghouse.
Today, Kristin’s projects have a less supernatural bent and the subject of her work is often her beloved pup (and our mascot!) Orbit. Kristin and Orbit love hiking on the weekends; and Kristin is currently creating an illustrated book of their adventures. In addition to art and Orbit, Kristin also loves podcasts, changing her hair color on a weekly basis, and DIY projects for her new apartment. At Pure Chat, Kristin is our resident designer and just finished a head-to-toe rebrand of the website and product.
Kyle
Kyle is a world traveler. In the last year alone he’s visited eight countries on three continents including Mexico, Germany, Finland, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Japan and Russia! Although he loved every destination, Kyle was particularly inspired by Russian history and has started learning the language and designing a Russian typeface.
When he’s not traveling Kyle likes reading, playing video games with his friends, and sketching out new product ideas in his Moleskine. He’s constantly learning new things and is addicted to Medium, Kickstarter and Product Hunt (where he is Hunter #22355!). At work, Kyle is excited to make Pure Chat as intuitive as possible for our small business customers and influence the direction Pure Chat will go in the lead generation space.
Robert
Robert loves hockey. I mean, Robert reaaally loves hockey. He is a hockey stats junkie, an unofficial Coyotes team historian (he’s yet to be beat in Coyotes trivia!) and admits to intense mood swings based on the result of a game. Besides loving the sport, he also loves the business side of hockey – watching salary caps, trades, team financial management, analytics and the increased prevalence of advanced statistics.
At Pure Chat, Robert does product testing and helps our customers stay happy with a big focus on optimizing the overall customer experience (you’ve probably talked to him through the chat box on purechat.com!). In our ever-evolving, fast paced startup, Robert loves participating in strategic conversations that help shape the product direction and seeing the impact of those changes on our customers, milestones and goals (just like the Coyotes).
Dillan
Dillan has a lot of hobbies. On any given day you can catch him raising the chickens and quail he keeps in his backyard (he’s currently saving up to buy a farm!) or judging speech and debate competitions at his former high school. In addition to being a champion in congressional humorous interpretation and duo acting, he also performs in musicals at the local community college and sings in a barbershop choir. As you can imagine, his karaoke rendition of “I Won’t Give Up” during our Holiday party was perfection!
At Pure Chat, Dillan does customer support and QA using Selenium, which makes him well-loved by our customers and developers alike. He loves figuring out why a bug is a bug and explaining technical processes in a non-technical way for our small business customers. The best part about his role is hearing feedback from customers and implementing the changes within Pure Chat.
Arielle
Arielle is a self-proclaimed thrift shop junkie. But for her it’s not just about fashion or the thrill of the (bargain) hunt; it’s about getting the chance to resurrect old pieces and give them new life in her eclectic wardrobe. Rifling through the racks for high-quality (albeit dated) pieces and making them her own is a favorite creative pastime. Plus, she loves that it’s a sustainable way to reduce clothing waste in landfills, even if it adds to the clutter in her closet!
Conscious living and appreciating the little things is a big piece of who Arielle is. This summer she lived without a car (in Arizona, no less!) and used it as an opportunity to enjoy more of the beauty around her. Arielle also loves going to see classic movies and taking a big, international trip every year. At Pure Chat, Arielle does all things marketing-related and is really excited to keep refining their marketing machine to create even more successful customers.
Sebalis
Sebalis is all about CGO. Challenges, growth and optimization. You can see this theme of optimization all through his life. Any time he sees something that has the potential to help him learn something new — magazines, articles, infographics, investments, and smart people, he explores it. Right now he’s reading about war stories and theories in 33 Strategies of War by Robert Green. He actually studied political science in school and has always loved political thought, civil and international events, and political patterns.
He constantly sees opportunities to make something more efficient and loves developing better processes, policies and procedures. He loves driving, and was a professional F1 driver in his former life. He has a dream of bringing more efficient policies to the world, as well as eliminating “stupid” driving. He may have to switch focuses however, with new twin girls on the way! At Pure Chat, he helps us grow our business by connecting us with other businesses that share our passion for small businesses.
Lindsay
Lindsay is a product-person at heart and loves solving problems for small business. She started her life as a tightly-wound, type-A personality, but has slowly unravelled to become more relaxed (while still ambitious). You can see this evolution through her Instagram photos that are now mostly of food (she is always trying new locally-owned restaurants) and photos of her husband and two Bengal cats, Loulabelle and Remington.Hamid
Hamid is all about creating great products. To him, there’s nothing more rewarding than building something people love to use. Ever since he typed his first line of code at age 10, Hamid has been hooked on creating software products and over the last 20 years Hamid has founded three software companies (including Pure Chat).
In addition to his passion for products, Hamid also loves hanging out with his kids, going to basketball games, and exploring exotic destinations. Over the last few years his family has visited Africa, Thailand and Japan; and this year he’s planning their first trip to Brazil for the 2016 Olympics!
As the leader of our startup team Hamid’s job is to “make sure the right people are on the bus and it has enough fuel to get to its destination.”
Great blog post, Pure Chat team! I shared with my marketing team as well as our CEO, Tara. We really enjoyed reading it and learning about your passionate, talented and driven team. Kudos and keep up the awesome work 🙂