Developer Spotlight: Jack, CTO of Kumo

Profile:

Name: Jack Reichelt

Role: Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder

Company: Kumo Study

Company one-liner: Learning tool to help students with ADHD

Funding stage: Pre-seed

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Read on to learn:

• What it’s like joining an early stage startup as CTO and technical co-founder
• His journey from being a regular software engineer to becoming a CTO of an ed-tech startup
• The pros and cons of the role compared to your typical software engineering jobs
• What non-technical founders need to show to convince technical people to come onboard

Tells us a bit about yourself Jack

I’ve been a software developer for the past 13 years doing all sorts of different things. I was a consultant early on, working at Industrie&Co that was later acquired by Accenture. I’ve worked at a few ed-tech companies including Connect-Ed Code, the business owned by my wife and I which teaches programming to high school students, and I did two and a half years in big tech at Atlassian. 

I’ve always been interested in education and helping people learn which is why I joined Kumo as CTO. 

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What is Kumo Study?

Kumo Study is a startup building a study management tool for students with ADHD. They have proportionally much worse outcomes in tertiary education and graduate at much lower rates. Kumo is designed to mitigate as many of the difficulties these students face as we can.

(To learn more about Kumo - check out the interview we did with Kumo co-founder - Alex Kerr)

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What attracted you to Kumo?

A huge part of it is that I have ADHD. I didn’t know I had it when I was in university though. I thought everyone had the same kind of struggles and I just wasn’t as good at dealing with them. So I just soldiered on - actually failed my fair share of courses and had a very difficult time before eventually graduating.

I didn’t get diagnosed until 2020 after we went into lockdown. It turned out a lot of the coping mechanisms I had developed to handle my ADHD were dependent on being around other people. So once everyone started working from home, those mechanisms fell apart and I really struggled to be productive. 

Once I got diagnosed, I was actually able to look back even to early childhood and see it was affecting me even way back then. If I had known I had ADHD and had a tool like Kumo - I probably would have had a much easier time, and things would have gone a lot more smoothly with less stress and anxiety. 

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What’s it like joining such an early stage company? 

It’s very exciting because I get to be on the ground floor and go - what are things going to look like? What are the patterns we are going to use to build this? What tech stack are we going to use? It gives me a lot of freedom to express my own opinions. 

When you are working in a much larger team or company, you largely do what is already being done, within an existing structure. It’s very rare to get to work on a greenfield project. 

So that’s a tremendous opportunity. It’s certainly a bit intimidating.

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What’s the most intimidating aspect of being CTO of a company at this stage?

At the end of the day the buck stops with you. I have to make sure I’m thinking things through and making reasonable, sensible decisions, being cognizant of timelines, budgets and all of the different factors. 

This has changed recently because we recently just hired another developer, but for the first while - it was just me, and I had to think of every different aspect and work out the whole project. 

When you’re a member of a larger team, you have lots of people you can bounce ideas off and collaborate with to come up with a good solution. 

I think this will change over time, but it’s certainly an intimidating aspect of joining at such an early stage. 

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What are the best and worst things about working at Kumo so far?

The best thing would be - I think we have a really good team. 

Everyone is really friendly. And given we are producing a product for people with ADHD, it’s a very ADHD friendly place to work.

The worst thing about it is that we need to make more money to be paid properly. I think a lot of founders are in that situation though. When you are hiring people - you need to pay them fairly. But the founders? Absolutely not.

That’s the deal though, but hopefully it pays off in the future. 

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Throwing out a controversial statement - do you think every software engineer should try being a startup CTO? Why or why not?

I don’t think so. But I do think that every software engineer should ensure they are building something they’re passionate about every once in a while. But you don’t need to be a startup CTO to do that. 

It certainly doesn’t come with job security or much of a safety net. And if you are like - “I don’t know how to do that feature” - you can’t just ask someone else. So it’s not for everybody and to be honest, if it wasn’t something I was passionate about - it wouldn’t be for me. 

That’s what enables me to do this work really. I do really care about ADHD and the struggling students, and if I didn’t - I don’t think I would be the right choice as CTO. I don’t think I could do it. I would be less inclined to put in the effort and the energy to solve all of the problems and answer all the questions. 

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Why do you think it’s important for every software engineer to work on something they are passionate about?

Ultimately because software development is a creative pursuit. It might not look like that to people on the outside, but it is. When you do creative work that you are not passionable about - it can become very draining. You will lose your enjoyment unless you find a way to restore it. Working on a project you are passionate about is very restorative. 

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What advice would you have for non-technical founders looking for a CTO?

Find someone who cares about the problem rather than someone who seems like they are the best at the latest technologies or whatever. Obviously you don’t want someone who cares, but doesn’t know anything - but you absolutely need someone who cares. 

The other thing is to look for someone who can speak honestly about what they do and don’t know already. 

Often when building tech, there are problems that come out from left of field, and you need someone who is able to say “I don’t know, let me do some research” and is then able to talk through the process and the conclusions of that research. Being able to honestly say - “Yes we can, or no we can’t. This is the kind of time frame. We can if we do XYZ.” You can’t just have someone that says “Yes” and then tries to work it out.

You need someone who can explain technical terms in a way that you understand. Because sometimes you will need to weigh in on things, and you need to understand why we can or cannot do things. The better someone can explain that - the easier time you will have. 

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How did Alex, the founder of Kumo convince you to join her team?

She seemed really prepared and I am a big believer in preparation. Even before we spoke over video chat she was like: “Here is the pitch deck. Here is the research I’ve done into ADHD. Here’s the designs of version 2 that we are heading towards.” She had all of these written things to show me, not to mention the existing working prototype. 

Sure there were some gaps but it didn’t matter that much. What mattered was - hey - this isn’t an idea that somebody just had a week ago! It’s someone who has had an idea and put work and research into it. She is clearly invested. 

She gave me the confidence that she would do whatever required to have it succeed. She could answer my questions. Even though she was non-technical, she had clearly talked to people who had built the prototype and could answer several of the technical questions. Say that - it’s hosted here and has this kind of backend et cetera. She showed willingness to learn things that are not in her field in order to make it succeed. It was just obvious that she cared a lot.

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Do you have any advice for software developers who would be interested in joining a startup as a CTO or starting a company of their own?

It will be easier and possibly tip it from being impossible to possible if you can solve a problem where you have some skin in the game. It could be a problem you had in the past, or a problem of a friend or family member, your local community, whatever. I think that’s almost a necessary part of being a founding CTO.

Also find the problem before you make the solution. Lots of technology companies just jump on the latest trend. Five years ago it was blockchain. Now it’s AI. You don’t want to just be making tools for things that don’t have a market