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John Thimsen

Founder Advisor — Engineering

LinkedIn
John Thimsen
“One of the most important leadership traits and desired cultural norms is having a growth mindset in the face of difficulties and setbacks. The writings of Marcus Aurelius & Seneca have been influential in my life, both personally and professionally. I’ve used this quote from Seneca extensively when facing difficult challenges with my teams — 'There is no easy way from the Earth to the stars.’”

John Thimsen

Founder Advisor — Engineering

LinkedIn

Title

Advisor | investor | CPTO at Mason and former CTO at Qualtrics

Founders Should Call Me When

You are 1) looking for advice on how to shape and create an R&D organizational structure to support growth in your business. 2) Evaluating leadership profiles. 3) Introducing new disciplines into the business. 4) Assessing the effectiveness of your existing engineering team processes. And 5) facing operational challenges with your product and/or platform.

Background

I’ve been an engineering leader for the last 20+ years at both large public companies and pre-IPO VC-backed startups. Most recently, I was the CTO at Qualtrics, where I was responsible for designing, building, and operating the XM Platform. In my eight years, I re-architected a single-product monolithic PHP architecture into a modern SaaS platform that supported multiple product lines and a monetized robust developer and partner ecosystem that supports 20k+ customers. I grew and scaled the organization from 100 to 1,500, building the information security, internal systems, IT, services engineering, and program management functions while the business grew from $100M to $1.5B in ARR, ultimately resulting in an IPO in 2021. Prior to Qualtrics, I spent 10 years at Amazon in a wide variety of roles, most recently as a founding member and head of engineering for Alexa. There, I grew that team from 0 to 235 in 3.5 years and shipped the first version of Amazon Echo. Prior to Amazon, I was an engineer and engineering lead at Microsoft, Active Voice Corporation, and Openwave systems.

Superpower

I’m at my best when a company has found product-market fit and needs to scale a single-product focused engineering team (roughly 30 FTEs) into a global, multi-disciplinary R&D organization (500+ FTEs). I’ve led multiple engineering teams on transformations where they have re-architected monolithic platforms and scaled their systems to support 10x usage. I’ve built out multiple program management functions that are focused on solving hard, cross-functional operational challenges (e.g., availability, latency, and efficiency of SaaS platforms). I’ve worked across platforms and products and have designed platforms that support multiple independent product lines several times in my career.

Lessons Learned

Scaling an organization requires prescience and adaptability in almost equal parts. I’ve learned that I need to plot a course to an imagined future state but also be able to pivot when new facts or circumstances inevitably arise.