This ex-Snackpass engineer is building the Superhuman for support teams
Hear from Andy Lebowitz about his startup journey from Snackpass to Fizz (YC S21), and how he's using his learnings to reimagine realtime analytics at Logtree.
Community Spotlight 💫
Meet Andy Lebowitz! A rising senior at the University of Michigan, Andy started coding Swift apps at the age of 13. He's worked at Snackpass (straight out of high school), Hebbia, Fizz, and now pursuing his own venture — Logtree.
We invited Andy to share his experiences working at different startups, and his journey of building his own. If you have any questions or want to learn more, reach out to him in V1 Slack or DM him on Twitter 🚀.
Without further ado, here’s Andy:
Q: Hey Andy! So glad to have you on Community Spotlight. To start, tell us a bit about yourself:
A: Hey! I’m from Cleveland and am now a senior studying computer science. I love startups and have worked at a couple including Snackpass, Hebbia, and Fizz, and want to start my own.
Q: How did you get into the startup space?
A: I started coding iOS apps in Swift when I was 13 but these were random side projects and apps where I had no serious intention of growing them. During my senior year of high school, one of my friends was trying to convince me to consider working at a startup, saying it’d be a great learning experience. I decided I might as well try and see how I liked it--I also thought it’d be interesting to have a job that better fit my career interests rather than teaching tennis lessons over the summer. I applied to a bunch and was fortunate enough to have this friend proof-reading my emails, helping me adjust my resume, etc through all this. Eventually I got hired at Snackpass, worked there for a year, loved it, and knew this was the kind of work I wanted to do.
Q: What resources have been helpful to you in your entrepreneurial journey?
A: My high school friend was really helpful in getting me started. Once I actually started at Snackpass I realized how awful my side project code quality was, since I was now getting code reviewed by people who I still consider excellent builders today. I put in really long work days to be able to get enough done where I felt like I wasn’t a burden to the company (I was really slow in the beginning). I’d say the fact that my first experience was Snackpass rather than another startup was actually pretty critical in improving my skills as a builder/entrepreneur and I don’t know if I’d be as interested in startups if I started out at a different company. If anyone else is looking to start working at a startup here are some things I would optimize for that I really appreciated at Snackpass:
Series A stage. This is because there were enough solid engineers around me where I could learn a lot from them, but could still face some big individual responsibilities with my own work, and there was a risk of doing harm to the company by pushing a bug or vulnerability--anything I built would go out to hundreds of thousands of people and this added some healthy pressure. It’s also the point where your company is usually approaching or has product-market fit.
Align with the priorities of the founders. Snackpass generally tried to build as little as possible to see if something would work. For example, a painted door test where you have a button like “Use promo” which really did nothing and you’re just testing how many people click on it/care about it before you build the full feature. UI is not important to optimize in the beginning as long as it’s decent. On the other hand I’ve seen other companies where the founder cares about optimizing CSS and I have literally pair programmed moving a button by a few pixels--I think this is a waste of time and really bad prioritization.
Work somewhere with great builders. It’s hard to see if a company has good builders until you actually start working there. I personally consider great builders as people who have a very high output of clean code. There are a lot of people with PhDs from top schools, 4.0 GPAs, objectively smart people who are still not good at this. The most helpful signal I’ve found for this is seeing if the company has employees who A) want to start their own company or B) do lots of side projects. Snackpass had a decent amount of these people when I was there.
Q: Tell us about your latest venture, Logtree. What drove you to build it? What’s your vision moving forward?
A: Logtree is a realtime event monitoring API. I built it because in past companies we’ve used Slack to keep an eye on things and this consistently broke/did not scale. My main priority with Logtree right now is seeing if there are any niche use cases that people care to see analytics about where other tools aren’t already good solutions. Lots of things are TBD based on what I learn over the next few weeks.
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